PENCRAFT 


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THE    BODLEY    HEAD 


PENCRAFT 

A  PLEA  FOR  THE  OLDER  WAYS 

BY  WILLIAM    WATSON 


LONDON:   JOHN    LANE     THE    BODLEY    HEAD 
NEW    YORK:    JOHN    LANE    COMPANY     MCMXVII 


WILLIAM    BRENDON  AND  SON,  LTD.,  PLYMOUTH,  ENGLAND. 


PENCRAFT 


PENCRAFT 


DE  QUINCEY,  whose  fame  as 
the  inventor  of  a  very  rich 
if  sometimes  over-elaborated 
prose  style  has  perhaps  unduly  ob- 
scured his  specific  services  to  criticism, 
divided  literature,  as  all  its  lovers  are 
aware,  into  two  great  main  classes :  the 
literature  of  Knowledge  and  the  litera- 
ture of  Power.  This  formula,  besides 
its  admirable  and  heroic  brevity,  has  a 
largeness  and  sweep  which  command- 
ingly  strike  the  mind  ;  and  if  at  first 
sight  it  seems  to  want  the  further  merit 
of  being  all-embracing,  this  apparent 
defect  fades  away  upon  nearer  view. 
For  the  more  delicate  and  exquisite 

7 


8  PENCRAFT 

products  of  literary  art — the  feminine 
things  in  literature — such  as  appear 
superficially  to  have  little  relation  to 
what  we  commonly  call  Power,  and 
perhaps  as  little  to  Knowledge,  are 
seen,  on  closer  acquaintance,  to  come 
of  the  same  parentage  as  the  rest : 
though  not  the  sons,  they  are  the 
daughters  of  the  house,  and  are  no  less 
the  children  of  Power  than  are  their 
more  sinewy  brothers.  And  so,  the 
oftener  we  examine  and  test  De 
Quincey's  famous  classification,  the 
more  shall  we  find  it  to  be  truly  a 
comprehensive  one,  masking  in  sim- 
plicity its  catholic  inclusiveness. 

For  the  purposes  of  an  argument 
which  I  hope  to  develop  a  little  later 
on,  I  propose  here  to  set  up  a  formula 
of  my  own — a  formula,  I  must  apolo- 
getically admit,  as  dry  and  unromantic 
in  its  terms  as  De  Quincey's  formula  is 
noble  and  imposing.  If,  however,  the 


PENCRAFT  9 

reader  can  be  induced  to  overcome  his 
very  natural  repugnance  to  its  un- 
captivating  aspect,  he  will,  I  think, 
find  in  it  the  homely  virtue  of  practical 
utility.  I  propose,  then,  to  divide 
literature  into  three  kinds  or  orders, 
and  to  call  them  the  cantative,  the 
scriptive,  and  the  loquitive.  I  am 
conscious  that  these  are  far  from  being 
words  of  witchery,  but  they  are  the 
best  that  I  can  find  or  make,  and  I  will 
ask  the  reader  not  to  be  deterred  by 
their  forbidding  appearance  from  going 
any  further  along  the  road  where  I 
invite  his  company. 

Let  me  ^ay  at  once  that  by  the  first 
of  my  three  orders  of  literature,  the 
cantative  order,  I  do  not  in  the  least 
mean  poetry  as  a  whole.  I  mean  the 
literature  which,  whether  metrical  or 
unmetrical,  whether  submissive  to  any 
law  of  formal  rhythm  or  not,  is  felt  to 
be,  in  its  nature  and  essence,  the  direct 


io  PENCRAFT 

outcome  of  such  emotions  or  states  of 
mind  as  are  quite  unrelated  to  what 
I  have  chosen  to  call  pencraft,  quite 
unrelated  to  the  pen,  and  capable  of 
uttering  themselves  through  but  one 
medium,  the  medium  of  quite  ob- 
viously and  literally  chanted  words. 
The  examples  which  most  readily 
occur  to  the  mind  are  in  the  Bible, 
and  are  thus,  for  English  readers,  in 
prose,  whatever  their  original  form. 
I  allude  to  such  masterpieces  of  pure 
cantation  as  David's  elegy  on  Saul  and 
Jonathan,  or  as  the  terrific  battle- 
paean  of  Deborah  and  Barak,  with  its 
savage  repetitions  and  antiphonal 
effects,  presenting  a  close  analogy  to 
some  of  the  immemorial  conventions 
of  Music  itself.  As  to  modern  ex- 
amples, I  know  of  few,  but  am  inclined 
to  think  that  a  little — a  very  little— 
of  the  finest  lyrical  verse  of  Shelley 
comes  singularly  near  to  falling  within 


PENCRAFT  ii 

my  definition,  and  in  virtue  of  so  doing 
will  probably  survive  when  some  of 
his  most  ambitious  performances, 
which  in  spite  of  many  splendours 
seem  to  miss  fire  as  poems  or  as  dramas, 
shall  be  little  better  than  forgotten. 
The  extreme  rarity  of  the  quality  I 
have  sought  to  indicate  may  be  illus- 
trated by  the  fact  that  in  the  entire 
work  of  Shelley's  contemporary,  Keats, 
I  am  not  sure  that  I  find  a  single  trace 
of  it.  I  do  not  say  this  with  the 
object  of  disparaging  Keats.  Indeed, 
were  I  to  judge  the  latter  tempera- 
mentally by  my  own  idiosyncrasy — 
a  process  against  which  any  one  claim- 
ing to  be  a  critic  ought  to  be  con- 
stantly and  most  vigilantly  on  his 
guard — I  should  be  disposed  to  pro- 
nounce him  a  greater  poet  than  his 
more  ethereal  survivor  and  elegist. 
I  merely  emphasise  a  difference  ;  I  do 
not  suggest  an  inferiority  ;  and  the 


12  PENCRAFT 

nature  of  the  difference  may  be  best 
exemplified  by  his  best  work — by  a 
sonnet  like  that  on  Chapman's  Homer, 
or  by  that  stanza  of  the  Ode  to  a 
Nightingale  which,  from  its  first  line 
to  its  last,  touches  the  uttermost  limit 
and  reach  of  Keats's  entrancing  genius  : 

"  Thou  wast  not  born  for  death,  immortal 

bird! 

No  hungry  generations  tread  thee  down  ; 
The  voice  I  hear  this  passing  night  was 

heard 

In  ancient  days  by  emperor  and  clown  : 
Perhaps  the  self -same  song  that  found  a  path 
Through  the  sad  heart  of  Ruth,  when  sick 

for  home, 
She  stood  in  tears  amid  the  alien  corn  ; 

The  same  that  oft-times  hath 
Charmed  magic  casements,   opening  on 

the  foam 
Of  perilous  seas,  in  faery  lands  forlorn." 

That  is  bewitching,  ravishing.  To  me 
it  seems  unsurpassable.  But  it  is 


PENCRAFT  13 

not  chanted  words  :    it  is  supremely 
beautiful  writing. 

Therefore  this  wonderful  and  often 
quoted  passage — and,  indeed,  so  far 
as  I  am  able  to  see,  all  its  author's 
poems,  without  an  exception — range 
themselves  within  what,  without  in  the 
least  suggesting  grades  of  excellence, 
I  take  leave  to  classify  as  the  second 
of  my  three  kinds  or  orders  of  literature, 
the  scriptive  order  :  that  is  to  say, 
the  essentially  written,  as  distinguished 
from  that  not  necessarily  greater  but 
perhaps  more  elemental  thing,  the 
essentially  chanted  word.  Within  this 
scriptive  order  the  vast  mass  of  fine 
literature,  whether  in  prose  or  verse, 
is  in  fact  embraced ;  but  it  is 
scarcely  necessary  to  observe  that 
there  are  some  writers  whose  works 
belong  to  it  more  absolutely,  through 
and  through,  body  and  soul,  than  do 
the  works  of  certain  others.  Such  a 


i4  PENCRAFT 

writer,  I  think,  is  Landor,  from  whom 
I  will  permit  myself  the  luxury  of 
quoting  the  following  sentence  on 
Dante :  "He  had  that  splenetic 
temper  which  seems  to  grudge  bright- 
ness to  the  flames  of  Hell ;  to  delijht 
in  deepening  its  gloom,  in  multiplying 
its  miseries,  in  accumulating  weight 
upon  oppression,  and  building  laby- 
rinths about  perplexity."  That  is  a 
lordly,  a  magnificent  sentence,  and  it  is 
very  fine  criticism  to  boot.  But  though 
it  is  actually  supposed  to  be  uttered 
orally  by  one  of  the  speakers  in  his 
Pentameron  its  tones  are  palpably 
such  as  never  yet  proceeded  from  the 
living  human  mouth  ;  its  cadences, 
its  modulations,  are  altogether  those 
of  the  pen  ;  it  cannot  be  thought  of 
apart  from  the  pen  ;  it  is  a  little 
miracle  of  pencraft.  Notwithstanding 
that  so  much  of  his  work  is  outwardly 
cast  in  conversational  mould,  I  take 


PENCRAFT  15 

Landor  to  be  in  essence  a  rather 
extreme  development  of  the  strictly 
scriptive  order  of  literature — an  author 
who,  alike  in  his  prose  and  his  often 
noble  verse,  never  for  a  moment  goes 
anywhere  near  to  touching  the  confines 
of  that  order,  where  it  reaches  out 
towards  what  I  have  called  the  can- 
tative  on  one  side  and  the  loquitive 
on  the  other.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact 
that  order  comprehends,  as  we  have 
noted,  the  major  part  of  literature 
proper,  and  thus  includes  the  work  of 
writers  as  far  asunder  as  Hooker 
from  Goldsmith,  as  Bolingbroke  from 
Bunyan,  or  as  the  creator  of  Dugald 
Dalgetty  from  the  creator  of  Job. 

I  pass  now  to  my  third,  or  what  I 
have  proposed  to  call  the  loquitive, 
order  of  literature.  The  first  and  most 
transcendental  of  our  three  orders  has 
its  foundation,  as  we  have  seen,  in 
primitive  and  deep-seated  human  emo- 


16  PENCRAFT 

tions  and  impulses,  as  obscure  in  their 
origin  as  the  impulse  of  laughter  or  the 
impulse  by  which  in  earlier  ages  men 
rent  their  garments  during  extreme 
and  violent  grief.  The  second  order, 
which  I  have  termed  the  scriptive, 
rests  largely  on  a  convention,  the  great 
convention  of  the  pen,  in  obedience  to 
which  the  human  mind  utters  itself 
with  a  certain  traditional  formality, 
a  degree  of  state  and  ceremony  not 
used  in  conversation.  The  third  or 
loquitive  order  has  necessarily  neither 
the  mysterious  sanctity  of  the  first 
nor  the  less  remote  and  more  approach- 
able dignity  of  the  second,  but  in 
form  and  substance  is  little  if  at  all 
distinguishable  from  conversational 
speech.  It  is  essentially  talk,  arrested 
and  perhaps  methodised ;  at  its  best, 
the  talk  of  genius ;  talk  which  has  more 
or  less  purged  itself  of  what  is  casual 
and  fugacious,  and  has  submitted  to 


PENCRAFT  17 

direction,  co-ordination,  and  discipline. 
The  classical  example  of  this  order  of 
literature  is  perhaps  Montaigne,  but 
among  authors  of  our  own  time  and 
country  one  might  point  to  the  late 
Andrew  Lang  as  a  writer  who  was 
almost  always  interesting  and  not 
seldom  illuminating,  but  whose  tone 
and  manner,  deliberately  and  by  choice, 
are  the  tone  and  manner  of  talk. 

Here  let  me  say  that  I  assign  no 
rigid  and  exact  boundaries  to  any-  of 
my  three  orders  of  literature.  Their 
frontiers  are  here  and  there  debatable, 
as  where  pure  cantation  relaxes  and 
sinks  into  a  kind  of  recitative.  Much 
of  Paradise  Lost  seems  to  me  a  kind  of 
recitative.  And  at  the  other  end  of 
the  scale — the  loquitive  end — talk  may 
lapse  or  decline — I  will  not  say  de- 
generate— into  prattle.  Pepys  is  a 
prattler,  even  if  an  immortal  one. 
But  allowing  for  some  fluidity  in  their 


i8  PENCRAFT 

confines  I  think  that  my  three  orders 
not  only  cover  all  literature,  whether 
in  verse  or  prose,  but  afford  such  a  basis 
for  at  least  the  approximate  delimita- 
tion of  its  chief  imperial  provinces 
as  may  be  found  modestly  serviceable 
to  those  engaged  in  that  task. 

Now  the  two  extremes,  the  pure 
cantative  at  one  end,  and  the  pure 
loquitive  at  the  other,  have  this  in 
common,  that  they  are  both  of  them 
equally  removed  from  what  is  strictly 
and  properly  pencraft ;  they  are  both 
of  them,  in  their  essence,  outside  the 
great  tradition  and  convention  of  the 
pen.  It  is  the  immense  middle  region 
that  is  absolutely  literature  ;  neither 
a  sublimely  abnormal,  half  preter- 
natural phenomenon  nor  a  transfigura- 
tion of  everyday  chit-chat,  but  abso- 
lutely literature.  And  this  immense 
middle  region  has  a  distinctive  language 
of  its  own,  a  language  which  is  neither 


PENCRAFT  19 

the  language  of  gods  nor  of  gamins, 
but  just  the  language  of  literature. 
And  when  I  observe  the  tendency, 
nowhere  so  marked,  I  might  say  so 
rampant,  as  among  a  section  of  the 
literati  themselves,  to  treat  the  language 
of  literature  as  something  to  be 
apologised  for,  with  secret  blushes, 
something  to  be  cravenly  disowned 
in  public  by  those  who  perhaps  have 
been  nourished  upon  it  from  their 
youth  up  in  private,  something  which, 
as  compared  with  the  language  of  real 
life,  is  a  shadowy  and  spectral  counter- 
feit or  substitute,  born  of  the  dead  air 
which  is  supposed  to  stagnate  behind 
never-opened  study  windows ;  when 
I  read,  as  I  lately  read  in  the  advertise- 
ment of  an  American  publisher,  of 
"  that  now  discredited  word  literary," 
and  of  how  this  and  that  author's 
books  are  well-springs  of  delight,  be- 
cause they  are  entirely  untainted  by 


20  PENCRAFT 

anything  which  "  that  now  discredited 
word  literary "  is  held  to  connote  ; 
when  I  see  these  things — and  who  that 
ever  looks  at  the  literary  columns  of 
a  newspaper  or  turns  the  pages  of  a 
magazine  can  escape  seeing  them  ?- 
I  am  tempted  to  ask  :  What  is  this 
vehemently  repudiated  literary  lan- 
guage, this  lifeless  bloodless  thing, 
this  child  of  dust  and  ashes,  but  the  best 
and  most  perfected  fashion  of  human 
speech  ? — a  form  and  mode  of  human 
speech  at  once  amplified  in  range  and 
simplified  in  operation  by  being  de- 
livered from  all  the  ten  thousand 
hampering  accidents  which  nullify  and 
paralyse  the  language  of  real  life 
whenever  it  essays  to  perform  any  of 
the  nobler  offices  of  expression.  The 
language  of  real  life,  even  when  it 
attempts  only  the  smaller  things,  is 
usually  inexact  and  confused  and 
embarrassed ;  in  presence  of  the 


PENCRAFT  21 

greater  things  it  either  abdicates  alto- 
gether or  fumbles  and  stumbles  in 
helpless  incapacity  to  carry  out  its 
own  ill-defined  intentions.  It  habitually 
evades  the  greater  ideas  and  succumbs 
before  the  greater  emotions ;  if  it 
attempts  anything  better  it  quickly 
loses  its  way,  breaks  up,  and  is  dis- 
sipated and  dispersed  in  a  hundred 
blind  alleys.  The  directness  commonly 
claimed  for  it  is  really  one  of  its  rarest 
attributes ;  rather  is  its  course  a 
perpetual  zigzag.  In  other  words, 
the  language  of  real  life  is  a  veil,  a 
hindrance,  an  obstruction  ;  often  in 
effect  a  lying  witness,  even  when  it 
honestly  sets  out  to  tell  the  truth. 
To  the  deliberate  and  ordered  language 
of  literature  it  is  a  stammer  ;  it  is  not 
truly  an  utterance  at  all,  but  a  series 
of  defeats  or  retreats  in  the  vain  effort 
towards  utterance.  The  clarified  and 
sifted  language  of  literature,  on  the 


22  PENCRAFT 

other  hand,  is  relatively  achievement 
as  compared  with  failure  ;  it  does  what 
the  language  of  real  life  would  do  if 
it  could.  It  speaks  where  the  other 
mumbles  ;  it  is  articulate  where  the 
other  cannot  out  with  its  thoughts ; 
it  delivers  the  message  which  the  other 
has  dropped  by  the  way.  The  habit 
of  disparaging  and  belittling  this  pre- 
eminently efficient  manner  of  speech 
is  perhaps  foolish  enough  in  any  one, 
but  sits  with  a  peculiarly  ill  grace  upon 
those  whose  only  prowess  in  assaulting 
the  fort  has  been  acquired  whilst  be- 
longing to  its  garrison. 

Together  with  this  curious  tendency 
among  living  penmen  to  help  dethrone 
the  pen — a  tendency  which  is  simply 
a  fouling  of  their  own  nest  and  a  quite 
needless  surrender  to  the  Philistines — 
there  has  grown  up  an  allied  habit 
of  treating  the  beautiful  and  noble 
technique  of  literary  art  as  though  it 


PENCRAFT  23 

were  something  idle  a;.:l  trifling,  and 
even  illustrious  writers  have  lent  coun- 
tenance to  this  practice.  A  few  years 
ago  there  was  given  to  the  world  a 
private  letter  of  George  Meredith's 
in  which  he  took  occasion  to  speak 
sneeringly  of  Tennyson  as  being  "  still 
occupied  with  his  vowel-endings." 
Now  Mr.  Meredith  had  a  mind  of 
extraordinary  richness  and  vitality, 
which  I  would  not  for  the  world  be 
suspected  of  underrating,  but  to  sneer 
at  a  master  of  blank  verse  for  being 
"  still  occupied  with  his  vowel-end- 
ings "  is  just  as  foolish  as  it  would  be 
to  sneer  at  an  architect  for  being  "  still 
occupied  with  his  volutes  and  cornices." 
If  an  architect  proceeded  on  the  as- 
sumption that  he  had  a  soul  above 
volutes  and  cornices  the  result  would 
be  bad  architecture  ;  if  a  verse-maker 
looked  down  with  disdain  upon  all  such 
considerations  as  those  connected  with 


24  PENCRAFT 

vowel-endings  the  result  would  be,  as 
unhappily  it  often  is,  bad  verse.  Poetry 
is  just  as  much  an  art  and  craft  as 
architecture,  and  though  in  every  art 
the  major  effects  are  no  doubt  obtained 
by  breadth  and  sweep  of  design  and 
conception,  there  are  also  the  humbler 
ancillary  details,  which  make  their 
indispensable,  if  often  undetected  and, 
as  one  may  say,  insidious  contribution 
to  the  general  end  ;  and  the  complete 
master  is  he  who  can  hold  many  threads 
together,  and  who  has  at  once  an  ear 
for  the  divine  promptings  and  a  hand 
for  half-mechanic  toil.  Had  Mere- 
dith's sneer  been  on  the  lips  of  a  lesser 
man  I  should  have  suspected  affecta- 
tion, the  common  affectation  of  superi- 
ority to  patient  laboriousness  ;  but  he 
was  too  sincere  for  affectation,  and  I 
take  it  that  this  was  simply  an  instance 
of  the  constitutionally  imperfect  sym- 
pathy felt  by  a  potent  and  abounding 


PENCRAFT  25 

mind  for  aims  and  methods  remote 
from  its  own. 

• 

Literary  affectation,  however,  is  a 
fact,  probably  as  old  as  the  care  for 
vowel-endings — with  which,  by  the  way, 
Tennyson  was  not  preoccupied  to  the 
exclusion  of  other  matters,  such  as 
the  pathos  of  religious  doubt,  and  the 
permanence  of  God  amid  the  tran- 
sience of  creeds.  And  truly  the  worst 
literary  pose  of  all  is  the  pose  of  un- 
literariness  ;  the  pose,  far  from  un- 
common to-day,  of  the  man  who  is 
obviously  a  man  of  the  pen,  but  who 
often  seems  to  write  in  order  to  display 
his  contempt  for  writing.  There  is  a 
school  of  authors  (flanked  and  sup- 
ported by  a  school  of  critics)  whom 
the  innocent  reader  pictures  as  living 
in  an  atmosphere  of  almost  violent 
reality.  Their  books  .are  of  the  kind 
which  are  praised  for  being  little  short 
of  brutally  "  alive  "  ;  their  pages 


26  PENCRAFT 

positively  exhale  virility,  and  they 
themselves,  in  the  intervals  of  literary 
production,  appear  to  be  engaged  in 
pastimes  beside  which  the  tiger-hunt 
is  an  enervating  and  emasculating 
form  of  indulgence  ;  but  experience 
has  taught  me  that  these  are  precisely 
the  persons  whom  one  can  count  upon 
meeting  at  every  literary  "  At  Home  " 
in  London,  where,  as  a  rule,  they  are 
easily  recognisable  by  their  stooping 
shoulders,  undeveloped  chests,  and 
atrabilious  complexions. 

In  regard  to  all  the  greater  arts— 
those  which  together  constitute  litera- 
ture by  no  means  excepted — it  is  little 
more  than  a  platitude  to  say  that  they 
cannot  be  worthily  pursued  without 
some  degree  of  honourable  pride,  the 
pride  of  a  dutiful  servant  in  serving  a 
noble  mistress.  The  servant  may  be 
as  apologetic  as  he  chooses  concerning 
the  imperfections  of  his  service,  but  to 


PENCRAFT  27 

be  apologetic  concerning  his  mistress 
herself  does  not  become  him.  It  is  out 
of  place,  and  among  artists  other  than 
literary  I  cannot  remember  ever  to 
have  observed  it.  I  have  never  heard 
among  painters  and  sculptors  such  a 
phrase  as  "  that  now  discredited  word 
artistic,"  any  more  than  I  have  ever 
heard  among  savants  such  a  phrase  as 
"  that  now  discredited  word  scientific." 
It  is  among  the  literati  alone  that  we 
meet  with  a  kind  of  shamefaced  dis- 
loyalty towards  her  whom  they  have 
the  glory  to  serve.  Some  of  them  seem 
to  be  always  saying  sadly  :  "  Yes,  we 
feel  that  we  are  only  literary  persons, 
and  that  this  is  a  far  smaller  thing 
than  to  be  men  and  women/'  Perhaps 
it  is ;  perhaps  art  itself  is  a  smaller 
thing  than  life.  The  minaret  is  smaller 
than  the  mosque,  the  peak  is  less  than 
the  mountain,  but  they  do  neverthe- 
less beautifully  crown  the  whole,  which 


28  PENCRAFT 

without  these  summits  would  not  be 
what  it  is.  I  will  permit  myself  the 
liberty  of  saying  here  that  I  have 
noticed  in  the  published  correspon- 
dence and  other  writings  of  great 
modern  musicians  a  frankness  and 
engaging  wholeheartedness  in  discuss- 
ing their  own  craft  and  vocation,  such 
as  seemed  to  me  to  be  altogether 
commendable,  and  to  contrast  favour- 
ably with  the  hesitance,  the  timorous- 
ness,  the  disposition  to  make  needless 
concessions  and  capitulations  to  the 
uncultivated  indifferentist,  which  I  so 
often  find  among  those  of  my  own 
calling  and  profession.  I  have  also 
noticed  in  the  current  criticism  of 
Painting  an  ample  and  generous  re- 
cognition of  the  importance  of  its 
manipulative  side,  a  living  interest  in 
the  business  and  technique  of  the  art, 
and  I  am  disposed  to  think  that  the 
criticism  of  poetry  would  lose  nothing 


PENCRAFT  29 

in  vision  and  gain  much  in  sure- 
footedness  by  a  larger  infusion  of  the 
same  spirit.  It  might  even  operate  as 
a  useful  corrective  to  the  tendency, 
observable  more  and  more  in  the 
criticism  of  poetry,  to  enthrone  the 
amateur,  the  half-artist  half-pretender 
who  seems  never  to  have  submitted 
himself  to  the  salutary  tedium  of  ap- 
prenticeship, who  has  never  mastered, 
and  in  some  cases  insolently  dis- 
dains to  master,  his  medium,  his 
vehicle  of  expression.  I  neither  ex- 
aggerate nor  speak  at  random  when  I 
say  that  there  are  living  critics  of 
English  poetry — and  critics  whose  gifts 
and  powers  I  respect  as  sincerely  as  I 
deplore  the  manner  of  their  exercise — 
who  positively  and  openly  resent  sound 
workmanship  and  high  finish,  as  if 
these  things  not  only  argued  the 
existence  of  "  some  hidden  want," 
some  hollowness  which  they  were 


30  PENCRAFT 

designed  to  cover,  but  as  if  they  were 
actually  an  offence  in  themselves, 
or  as  if  it  were  a  poet's  unquestioned 
duty  to  emulate  those  painters  who  by 
preference  leave  all  their  brushmarks 
on  the  canvas.  This  spirit,  reappearing 
from  time  to  time  in  our  criticism, 
may  in  some  measure  help  to  explain 
what  is  psychologically  a  very  in- 
teresting phenomenon — the  periodic 
outbreak  in  our  literature  of  something 
disordered  and  disorderly,  as  if  in 
response  to  a  secret  weariness  of  any 
force  that  is  chastened  or  beauty  that 
is  law-abiding  ;  but  both  the  spirit 
and  the  phenomenon  seem  to  suggest 
that  in  spite  of  all  our  vitality  and 
potency  we  are  yet  in  our  aesthetic 
instincts  a  barbaric  people  as  compared 
with  the  race  that  fixed  the  paramount 
types  of  form  and  comeliness.  Cer- 
tainly the  very  marked  prevalence  and 
influence  at  the  present  day  of  the 


PENCRAFT  31 

spirit  to  which  I  allude  may  well 
warrant  the  reflection  that  while  the 
criticism  of  English  poetry  has,  during 
recent  years,  been  carried  on  with 
admirable  sincerity  and  unwaning 
brilliance,  the  maintenance  of  these 
qualities  at  so  high  a  pitch  of  power 
has  nevertheless  coincided,  in  many 
quarters,  with  a  visibly  loosening  hold 
upon  certain  laws  and  principles  lying 
at  the  root  of  all  sound  aesthetic 
judgment ;  laws  and  principles  per- 
haps coy  to  any  attempt  at  rigid  for- 
mulation, yet  in  their  essentials  broadly 
deducible  from  tradition  and  from  the 
immemorial  practice  of  the  greater 
poets  ;  laws  and  principles  in  defiance 
of  which,  no  matter  how  gifted  or 
how  daring  the  defier,  no  noble  poetry 
ever  has  been,  or  ever  can  be,  con- 
ceived and  brought  to  birth. 

Reverting  for  a  moment  to  what  I 
have  called  the  pose  of  unliterariness, 


32  PENCRAFT 

I  venture  to  draw  the  attention  of  the 
curious  to  the  ironic  fact  that  writers 
who  adopt  it  make  their  most  successful 
appeal  to  the  ultra-literary  ;  it  is  a 
pose  that  fails  pitiably  to  impress  the 
unsophisticated  million.  No  great 
writer  ever  demanded  more  insistently 
to  be  considered  as  the  natural  man 
addressing  the  natural  man  than  did 
Whitman  ;  no  great  writer  ever  had  a 
more  essentially,  I  had  almost  said 
narrowly,  literary  audience.  His  suc- 
cess was  largely  a  capture  of  the 
coteries.  In  America,  where  one 
hears  in  private  a  good  deal  concerning 
his  far  from  contemptible  genius  for 
advertisement  that  is  not  heard  in 
England,  his  truly  magnificent  pose 
was  fairly  well  recognised  as  a  pose 
from  the  first ;  in  this  country  it  was 
scarcely  an  accident  that  the  chorus  of 
somewhat  exaggerated  acclaim  that 
greeted  him  in  the  early  'seventies 


PENCRAFT  33 

ascended  mainly  from  a  group  of 
enthusiasts  who  were  nothing  if  not 
men  of  letters  to  their  finger-tips. 
The  boisterous  and  shaggy  barbarian 
of  Brooklyn  had  provided  a  novel 
stimulus  for  the  jaded  literary  palates 
of  the  mildest-mannered  of  Irish  pro- 
fessors and  the  most  vehement  of 
illustrious  English  poets. 

Swinburne  afterwards  apostatised 
from  Whitman,  and  the  levity  of  the 
recantation  inspires  misgivings  as  to 
the  deep-rootedness  of  the  creed.  With 
all  his  vagaries  the  poet  who  had  reviled 
Horace  as  a  sycophant,  who  had 
described  one  of  the  most  insalubrious 
of  French  novels  as  "  the  Holy  Writ 
of  beauty,"  and  had  apotheosised 
Villon — a  member  of  the  dangerous 
classes  with  a  knack  of  writing — was 
yet  a  lord  of  pencraft,  and  must  have 
known  with  what  ease  any  moderately 
clever  man  who  chose  to  do  it  could 


34  PENCRAFT 

write  page  on  page  of  dithyramb 
indistinguishable  from  Leaves  of  Grass. 
The  excesses  of  Whitman-worship 
had  disgusted  him :  I  hazard  the 
surmise  that  the  later  and  more 
grotesque  extravagances  of  the  Blake 
cult  can  hardly  have  been  much  more 
truly  to  his  taste.  Blake,  he  has  told 
us,  in  picturesque  if  somewhat  con- 
torted language,  "  founded  at  mid- 
night "  the  "  school  "  of  poets  which 
Coleridge  "  ratified  at  sundawn."  The 
chronology  is  loose,  and  the  con- 
fraternity of  totally  independent  poets 
to  which  Coleridge  belonged  was  in  no 
sense  a  school,  while  I  greatly  doubt  if 
any  of  its  members  would  for  a  moment 
have  acknowledged  Blake  as  the 
founder  of  their  fellowship  ;  but  the 
confident  boldness  of  the  statement, 
with  its  sonorous  tone  as  of  a  pro- 
clamation, is  grandiose  and  imposing. 
I  am,  however,  inclined  to  think  that, 


PENCRAFT  35 

as  a  founder,  a  somewhat  more  tenable 
claim  could  be  advanced  for  Blake  in 
another  if  kindred  field.  He  is  the 
author  of  a  proverb  or  apothegm — 
"  Damn  braces,  bless  relaxes  " — which 
compels  admiration  for  its  pregnant 
succinctness,  but  on  every  other  ground 
is  as  thoroughly  bad,  pernicious,  and 
disintegrating  in  aesthetics  as  it  is  in 
ethics,  and  from  which  a  whole  school 
and  theory  of  criticism  may  with  some 
plausibility  be  alleged  to  have  sprung. 
This  saying  is  indeed  the  very  charter 
of  anarchy.  It  is  as  welcome  as  an 
evangel  to  all  the  incompetents  and 
incorrigibles  who  hate  nothing  so  much 
as  authority  and  discipline.  It  is 
probably  the  most  concise  expression 
on  record  of  a  critical  philosophy 
eminently  dear  to  a  certain  callow  sort 
of  mind  ;  the  sort  of  mind  which  can 
never  understand  that  in  Letters,  as 
in  conduct,  strait  is  the  gate  and  narrow 


36  PENCRAFT 

is  the  way  that  leadeth  to  eternal  life  ; 
the  sort  of  mind  which  can  always  be 
trusted  to  choose  and  single  out  for 
homage,  among  the  children  of  Im- 
agination, her  surreptitious  bastards 
rather  than  her  acknowledged  issue, 
born  of  her  marriage  with  Law. 

To  my  mind  the  professed  lover  of 
poetry  in  whose  pantheon  Blake  has  a 
commanding  pedestal  while  Pope  has 
none  is  a  person  whose  education  in 
the  lyre  has  left  off  not  far  from  where 
it  ought  to  have  commenced.  The 
greatness  of  Blake's  genius  in  pictorial 
invention  stands  above  challenge,  nor 
do  even  its  most  fantastic  feats  re- 
quire vindication.  In  that  realm  he  is 
secure  :  he  moves  undismayed  among 
the  most  daunting  apparitions ;  he 
is  at  ease  alike  in  Satanic  and  celestial 
society  ;  he  has  given  solidity  to  his 
dreams,  stability  to  his  nightmare. 
But  when  this  profound  seer  and  sym- 


PENCRAFT  37 

bolist  exchanges  the  art  of  Diirer,  in 
which  he  is  a  compelling  master,  for 
the  art  of  Dante,  in  which  he  is  a 
faltering  pupil  —  exchanges  a  truly 
inspired  burin  for  a  most  unsure  and 
infirm  pen — he  is  like  a  man  leaving 
his  native  country,  whose  laws  and 
customs  were  his  birthright,  and  ven- 
turing without  passport  into  a  land 
with  whose  very  language  he  has  but 
a  beginner's  acquaintance.  Poetry  is 
not  a  kingdom  to  be  annexed  in  that 
casual  way.  I  say  poetry,  for  in 
discussing  Blake  I  avoid,  by  set  pur- 
pose, those  impenetrable  banks  of 
prose  fog  lying  somewhere  to  leeward 
of  his  Parnassus  and  commonly  styled 
his  Prophetic  Books.  My  concern  is 
not  with  writings  of  which  the  interest, 
if  they  have  any,  is  of  a  kind  bordering 
on  the  pathological,  but  with  those 
productions  of  a  man  of  genius  which 
his  more  rational  admirers  admit  to 


38  PENCRAFT 

contain  whatever  of  value  has  come 
from  his  pen.  At  the  head  of  his 
poetry,  by  general  consent,  I  think, 
stands  the  celebrated  poem  on  the 
tiger,  and  if  it  were  sustained  through- 
out at  the  level  of  its  superb  opening 
lines  it  would  be  sufficient  to  give  him 
an  unassailable  place  among  the  poets. 
Unfortunately  it  is  not  so  sustained, 
and  herein  it  illustrates  well  his  be- 
setting frailty.  The  wing  that  rises 
one  moment  flags  the  next ;  the  poem 
that  seems  auspiciously  born — witness 
that  haunting  little  piece,  The  Sun- 
flower— is  strangled  in  its  cradle.  In 
poetry,  if  the  race  is  to  the  swift,  the 
runner  will  fare  badly  whose  swift- 
ness at  starting  is  foiled  in  a  trice 
by  shortness  of  breath.  This  poet's 
wizardry  can  build  us  a  fairy  porch, 
but  entering  we  find  that  the  porch 
is  well-nigh  all.  Let  us  freely  admit 
that  here  was  wizardry,  but  let  us  not 


PENCRAFT  39 

so  debase  our  standards  of  comparison 
as  to  confuse  the  poor,  baffled  master 
of  a  single  magic  moment  with  the 
great  enchanters  who  call  up  palaces 
from  the  void. 

Blake  could  now  and  then  give  to  a 
prose  aphorism  a  terseness  and  tense- 
ness which  make  his  resignation  to  a 
mostly  ungirdled  and  slattern  Muse  the 
more  surprising.  And  if  we  compare 
minutely  the  earlier  and  later  versions 
which  we  possess  of  The  Tiger  we 
shall  find  that  he  was  quite  capable 
of  the  laborious  revision  of  obstinate 
details,  quite  capable  of  toiling  hard 
to  present  coherently  a  thought  which 
he  had  at  first  only  half  articu- 
lated ;  but  he  was  quite  incapable 
of  so  reviving  the  original  genera- 
tive mood  out  of  which  a  whole 
poem  arose  as  to  reconceive  ab  ovo 
its  misgrown  or  arrested  parts  and 
develop  them  afresh  on  the  lines  of 


40  PENCRAFT 

organic  and  normal  evolution.  Such 
an  incapacity  betokens  some  deep 
inward  stultification  and  disablement, 
not  apt  to  afflict  even  the  lesser  masters 
of  song,  who  are  masters  largely  in 
virtue  of  their  power  to  control  in 
some  degree  the  tidal  movements  of 
their  own  minds,  and  to  induce  by 
volition  what  at  first  came  to  them 
independently  of  their  will.  In  the 
first  version  of  The  Tiger  there  are 
positive  lesions  of  sense,  raw  and  gaping 
wounds,  and  in  the  later  version  these 
are  treated  with  a  sort  of  surgery 
which  seems  curiously  to  combine  rash- 
ness and  hesitance,  almost  countenanc- 
ing the  surmise  that  some  friend  or 
critic  with  a  more  logical  grasp  of 
language  than  his  own  had  incited 
him  to  emendations  which  heal  the 
lacerated  tissue  but  leave  most  un- 
professional traces  of  suture.  However 
this  may  have  been,  the  conscientious 


PENCRAFT  41 

yet  hopeless  clumsiness  of  the  operation 
is  very  manifest,  and  is  of  a  nature 
which  argues  some  more  special  dis- 
ability than  is  involved  in  the  mere 
imperfect  equipoise  of  the  intellectual 
and  the  purely  poetic  faculties. 

I  do  not  deny,  for  it  is  undeniable, 
that  in  the  course  of  transit  from  a  sort 
of  glorified  nursery  babble  to  some- 
thing which  for  the  most  part  really 
seems  less  infantile  than  senile,  less 
reminiscent  of  the  lispings  of  child- 
hood than  prelusive  of  the  drivel  of 
dotage,  he  struck  a  few  vibrating 
and  penetrating  chords.  Justice  ob- 
viously demands  that  one  should  con- 
cede no  less,  and  with  that  concession 
I  am  of  opinion  that  justice  is  satisfied. 
But  these  few,  these  very  few  vibrating 
and  penetrating  chords,  mostly  evoked 
with  considerable  uncertainty  of  hand, 
are  not  sufficient  title-deed  to  such  an 
estate  in  fame  as  that  of  which  he 


42  PENCRAFT 

has  latterly  held  the  enfeoffment.  It 
is  certainly  no  small  thing,  at  any 
time,  to  write  verse  of  an  extreme  and 
nude  simplicity  without  incurring  the 
suspicion  that  its  artlessness  was  pre- 
meditated and  factitious,  and  to  do  this 
was  trebly  an  achievement  at  a  time 
when  the  reigning  mode  was  rather  to 
live  a  life  of  poetic  diction  and  be 
finally  rapt  from  earth  in  a  blaze  of 
antithesis.  I  recognise  that  in  re- 
lation to  an  epoch  such  verse  had  no 
little  significance  ;  the  significance  of 
sedition  uttered  with  impunity  under 
a  despot's  windows  :  but  that  is  the 
significance  of  a  symptom  chiefly,  like 
the  significance  of  Strawberry  Hill  in 
relation  to  the  Gothic  Revival.  It  is 
not  relative  but  absolute  values  which 
ultimately  count.  A  rose-grower  does 
not  send  to  a  rose-show  a  poor  starved 
imperfect  rose,  a  pathetic  piece  of 
arrested  development,  and  expect  it  to 


PENCRAFT  43 

carry  off  the  prizes  because  it  was 
grown  in  an  unfavourable  soil  and 
climate  and  is  a  horticultural  triumph 
relatively  to  those  adverse  conditions. 
The  rose  is  judged  with  sole  regard 
to  its  absolutely  accomplished  beauty 
as  a  rose  ;  on  no  other  ground,  by  no 
other  standard,  is  its  rank  in  the 
rose-world  determined.  On  the  like 
grounds,  by  the  like  criteria,  must  a 
poet's  final  place  be  fixed ;  and  tried 
by  these  tests,  which  seem  to  me  the 
eternal  ones,  I  find  .  Blake  wanting, 
while  Pope  emerges  from  the  ordeal, 
not  indeed  a  poet  of  very  deep  tones 
or  very  wide  gamut,  but  an  almost 
miraculous  performer  upon  a  rigor- 
ously limited  instrument,  which  obeys 
him  with  infallible  precision,  and 
seems  delighted  to  be  his  slave. 

Things  hidden  from  the  wise,  I  shall 
doubtless  be  reminded,  are  revealed 
unto  babes  ;  and  perhaps  I  shall  be 


44  PENCRAFT 

bidden  to  learn  that  one  who  is  a  babe 
in  the  craft  and  lore  of  the  pen  may  yet 
have  deeper  secrets  to  impart  than  were 
known  to  its  sagest  legislators,  from 
him  of  Stagyra  onward.  It  is  true 
that  the  capable  and  successful,  the 
easy  masters  of  life,  are  the  very  last 
persons  to  have  a  private  path  to  the 
Spheres,  to  have  visited  the  dark  side 
of  the  moon,  or  overheard  the  gossip 
of  the  galaxy.  Great  indeed  is  a 
"  profound  simplicity  of  intellect," 
great  can  be  the  power  of  the  childlike 
mind,  yet  I  do  not  know  that  I  am 
prepared  to  live  in  the  nursery  for  the 
distant  and  doubtful  chance  that  some 
apocalypse  may  there  be  vouchsafed 
which  is  denied  to  the  study  and  the 
cloister,  the  workshop  and  the  fields. 
The  adult  brain  craves  the  society 
of  adult  brains  and  the  harvest  of 
adult  experience.  The  childlike  mind 
did  not  write  Faust  or  Hamlet,  nor  do 


PENCRAFT  45 

the  fashioners  of  such  masterpieces 
lay  very  childlike  hands  on  their 
themes  or  material.  Humility  and 
diffidence,  and  even  a  too  nice  scrupu- 
lousness, are  rarely  prominent  among 
their  virtues.  Co  vet  able  estates  they 
seize  and  occupy,  with  scant  regard  to 
the  former  settlers,  who  had  thought 
their  own  tenure  a  freehold.  They  do 
not  appeal  to  us  by  any  pathos  of 
half-achievement.  There  is  no  shadow 
of  frustration  upon  them .  Their  annals 
are  a  story  of  overcoming. 

In  every  art  but  literature,  and  in 
every  department  of  literature  but 
poetry,  it  is  commonly  taken  for 
granted  that  before  the  artist  sets 
out  to  interpret  for  us  the  enigma  of 
the  universe  he  should  have  solved 
the  humbler  problem  of  how  to  use  in  a 
workmanlike  way  the  tools  he  works 
with.  In  poetry  alone  is  a  fumbling 
inefficiency  and  undexterity  in  the 


46  PENCRAFT 

handling  of  the  tools  not  only  permitted 
but  even  in  some  circles  applauded, 
not  only  applauded  but  even  viewed 
as  presumptive  evidence  of  the  more 
spiritual  gifts,  if  not  as  conferring  an 
actual  warrant  or  certificate  of  such 
endowments.  In  a  shoemaker  the 
habit  of  making  shoes  reasonably  well 
is  not  thought  a  more  insuperable  bar 
to  profound  or  impassioned  vision  than 
is  the  practice  of  making  them  villain- 
ously ill ;  but  in  a  verse-maker  the 
tendency  to  make  verses  which  con- 
form to  accepted  standards  of  shape- 
liness would  appear  to  be  regarded  by 
many  as  a  fundamental  disqualification 
for  any  luminous  insight  into  life  or 
nature,  while  such  insight  is  looked 
upon  as  something  to  be  quite  naturally 
predicated  of  one  whose  work  defies 
all  metrical  morphology  and  even 
refuses  to  submit  to  the  indignity  of 
scansion. 


PENCRAFT  47 

This  last  refusal  is  by  some  con- 
sidered especially  heroic  :  witness  the 
reception  accorded  by  critics  of  repute 
to  the  freaks  of  poets  who  in  recent 
years  have  maltreated  so  ruthlessly 
that  noble  and  distinctively  English 
possession,  our  so-called  blank  verse — 
a  measure  which,  as  a  national  heir- 
loom, might  have  been  thought  to 
have  a  sacredness  which  would  have 
saved  it  from  violence,  not  to  say 
defloration,  at  their  hands.  All  such 
assaults  upon  it  are  doomed  to  fail, 
but  certain  less  extreme  aggressions 
have  become  so  general  that  I  propose 
here  to  offer  a  few  observations  on  that 
misconception  of  the  nature  and  capa- 
bilities of  our  blank  verse  which  they 
reveal. 

This  measure,  which  seems  to  me  a 
more  perfect  vehicle  of  thought  and 
feeling  than  even  the  great  metre  of 
antiquity — avoiding  as  it  does  both 


48  PENCRAFT 

the  canter  of  a  too  dactylic  hexameter 
and  the  laggard  pace  of  a  too  spondaic 
one — is  a  form  of  verse  which  sanctions 
and  even  invites  a  large  amount  of 
liberty  within  the  scope  of  its  far  from 
inelastic  laws,  but  there  are  some  kinds 
of  licence  which  are  foreign  to  its  whole 
tradition.  One  of  them  is  the  crowding 
of  huddled  supernumerary  syllables 
into  a  line — a  practice  of  late  much 
favoured  amongst  us.  In  Italian,  with 
its  wealth  of  terminal  vowels  which 
minimise  friction  between  words,  and 
facilitate  their  gliding  interflow,  poetry 
attains  by  easy  and  natural  processes 
the  richly  undulatory  movement  of 
such  a  line  as  : 

"  Amor,  che  a  nutto  amato  amar  perdona,"  l 
and  thousands  of  like  mould.     Here., 
it  will   be  observed,   the   billowiness 
of  the  rhythm  rests  entirely  on  con- 
fluences of  terminal  and  initial  vowels, 

1  Inferno,  V,  103. 


PENCRAFT  49 

as  it  does  also  in  the  penultimate  foot 
of  this  line  of  Milton  : 

"  Damasco  or  Marocco  or  Trebisond." 
But  such  confluences  can  seldom  hap- 
pen in  English  :  instead  of  them  we 
have  collisions  of  consonants  ;  and  the 
attempt  made  by  several  of  our  living 
poets  to  reproduce  the  Italian  billowi- 
ness  without  the  help  of  the  Italian 
fluidity  results  for  the  most  part  in  a 
glut  of  hard,  clotted,  insoluble  sounds. 
Our  blank  verse  cannot  digest  them  ; 
it  is  convulsed  in  the  effort  to  vomit 
them  out.  The  very  spirit  of  this 
metre  is  strangely  misunderstood  by 
those  critics  who  imagine  it  capable  of 
indefinite  evolution  and  progress,  and 
are  constantly  demanding  from  it  these 
things.  They  seem  to  take  decom- 
position for  progress,  which  certainly 
in  a  sense  it  is — in  the  sense  that  it 
marks  a  further  stage  of  being  ;  but 
surely  that  particular  stage  is  one  to 


50  PENCRAFT 

be  postponed  as  long  as  possible,  not 
artificially  and  prematurely  induced. 
Certain  of  our  Georgian  singers,  and 
even  one  or  two  poets  whose  roots  go 
down  into  late- Victorian  antiquity, 
are  so  haunted  by  a  dread  of  smooth- 
ness that  they  have  very  nearly  erected 
cacophony  into  a  cult.  They  pursue 
it  as  an  end  in  itself  laudable  :  in  hoc 
malum  a  quibusdam  etiam  laboratur. 
They  appear  to  overlook  the  fact  that 
the  dissonance  which  may  be  of  value 
as  an  exception  loses  all  such  value 
when  it  becomes  the  rule  ;  and  that 
it  is  one  thing  to  vary  the  monotony 
of  harmony  by  an  occasional  discord, 
and  quite  another  thing  to  make  discord 
itself  so  monotonous  that  the  unfore- 
seen intrusion  of  harmony  shall  come 
as  a  disturbance  and  a  shock.  They 
even  forget  that  it  is  not  the  open 
and  flagrant  departures  from  regu- 
larity which  delight  the  ear,  but  the 


PENCRAFT  51 

scarcely  remarked  ones,  as  in  a  line 
like: 

"  Cooled   a   long   age   in   the   deep-delved 
earth." 

I  have  not  the  temerity  to  fling  myself 
against  the  general  opinion  of  critics 
concerning  Milton's  deviations  from 
normal  rhythm,  but  I  will  allow  myself 
to  say  this,  that  in  my  judgment  they 
are  far  the  most  felicitous  when  palp- 
ably dictated  by  some  specific  oc- 
casion or  object  and  not  by  the 
supposed  general  necessity  of  relieving 
a  too  uniform  steadiness  of  gait  and 
carriage.  Thus  when  he  writes  of 

"  Leviathan,  which  God  of  all  his  works 
Created  hugest  that  swim  the  ocean  stream," 

the  inflation  of  the  second  line  by  its 
redundant  syllable,  and  the  sense  of 
impeded  bulk  and  lumbering  power 
which  the  corrugated  words  convey, 
are  signally  apt  and  aiding.  But  not 


52  PENCRAFT 

finding  similar  enforcement  of  the  sense 
I  discern  no  very  special  happiness  in  a 
metrical  eccentricity  like  that  which 
occurs  in  the  passage  where  Satan 

"saw 
Virtue  in  her  shape  how  lovely,  saw,  and 

pined 
His  loss." 

The  loveliness  of  the  shape  of  Virtue 
hardly  seems  the  better  brought  home 
to  us  by  an  abnormality  in  the  shape 
of  the  blank  verse.  And  on  the  other 
hand,  to  suppose  that  Satan's  "  loss  " 
of  virtue  is  here  symbolised  by  the 
metre's  loss  of  form  "  were  to  consider 
too  curiously.''  In  Shakespeare,  when 
Hotspur  breaks  out : 

"  My  lord,  I  did  deny  no  prisoners  ; 
But  I  remember,  when  the  fight  was  done, 
And  I  was  dry  with  rage  and  extreme  toil, 
Breathless    and    faint,    leaning    upon    my 
sword, 


PENCRAFT  53 

There  came  a  certain  lord,  neat  and  trimly 

dressed, 
Fresh  as  a  bridegroom," 

and  so  on,  the  sudden  dishevelment  of 
otherwise  orderly  rhythm — whether  by 
accident  or  design  is  immaterial — 
seems  certainly  to  aid  the  sense.  He 
is  thundering  his  contempt  for  a  fop's 
unseasonable  neatness,  and  the  rumpled 
line  affects  us  as  a  flout  at  neatness  in 
general.  But  in  Milton  I  do  not  feel 
that  anything  is  gained  by  erratic 
metricism  when,  during  a  passage  of 
divine  majesty  and  pathos,  the  reader 
suddenly  comes  upon  that  strangely 
wayward  line  : 

"  And  Tiresias  and  Phineus,  prophets  old." 

I  do  not  forget  that  Milton  was  an 
accomplished  musician,  and  that  it  is 
one  of  the  devices  of  musicians  to 
torture  us  with  a  discord  in  order  that 
they  may  assuage  us  with  its  resolu- 


54  PENCRAFT 

tion  ;  and  this  may  have  been  what 
Milton  here  intended.  But  it  is  surely 
unfortunate  to  have  so  framed  the 
line  that  the  reader  stops  to  wonder 
whether  the  poet  really  dictated  it  in 
its  present  form  or  thus  : 

"  And  Phineus  and  Tiresias,  prophets  old," 

which  would  have  spared  our  ears 
any  disciplinary  exercise.  However 
that  may  have  been,  Milton,  in  the 
matter  of  eccentric  rhythms,  did  not 
sow  with  the  sack,  like  those  amongst 
us  who  write  as  if  metrical  laws  were 
made  solely  to  be  broken,  and  who 
break  them  till  their  pages  are  littered 
with  the  shards.  And  though  I  count 
him  king  of  poets  I  am  disposed  to 
think  that  those  who  are  not  them- 
selves of  the  blood  royal  might  perhaps 
with  greater  safety  follow  the  less 
august  example  of  Gray  ;  a  poet  oddly 
characterised  by  a  famous  critic  of  the 


PENCRAFT  55 

last  century  as  one  who  "  never  spoke 
out,"  but  in  whom  the  feature  which 
the  famous  critic  seems  to  have  mis- 
taken for  a  hampering  reticence  ap- 
pears to  me  a  superb  faculty  of  self- 
governance,  one  of  the  happiest  of  all 
gifts  ;  a  poet  who  could  be  felicissime 
audax  at  the  right  time  and  place,  and 
whose  few  violations  of  strict  metrical 
canon,  whilst  they  are  among  the 
most  exquisite  incidents  of  his  art, 
are  chiefly  such  by  virtue  of  the  apt 
and  special  service  they  render  to 
some  thought  or  image  or  fancy.  A 
charming  example  is  the  couplet  he  is 
said  to  have  thrown  off  during  a  walk 
with  a  friend  : 

"  There  pipes  the  songthrush,  and  the  sky- 
lark there 
Scatters  his  loose  notes  in  the  waste  of  air," 

the  delicately  "  loose "  versification 
taking  its  character  from  the  thing 


56  PENCRAFT 

described.  But  the  most  perfect  in- 
stance of  all  is  his  picture  of  the  Muse 
as  haunting  the  Chilean  forest,  where 

"  She  deigns  to  hear  the  savage  youth  repeat 
In  loose  numbers  wildly  sweet 
Their   feather-cinctured   chiefs   and   dusky 
loves." 

That  is  indeed  delectable,  that  is 
transporting  !  I  am  of  course  aware 
that  the  Gallios  who  care  for  none  of 
these  things  will  smile  at  my  en- 
thusiasm over  what  will  seem  to  them 
a  piece  of  idle  artifice.  They  are 
welcome  to  their  smile. 

It  will  by  this  time  have  been  seen, 
from  sundry  indications,  that  I  attach 
great  importance,  greater  than  some 
eminent  critics  would  countenance  me 
in  attaching,  to  qualities  which  by 
many  are  viewed  as  merely  external, 
as  no  more  than  auxiliary  and  sub- 
sidiary at  the  best,  and  at  the  worst  as 
positive  hindrances  and  trammels,  a 


PENCRAFT  57 

drag  on  the  hot  wheels  of  inspiration, 
a  bar  to  the  beautifully  unimpeded 
play  of  the  soul.  I  allude  to  qualities 
identical  in  essence  with  those  which, 
when  we  recognise  them  in  some 
material  object,  are  best  summed  up 
in  the  simple  comment  that  the  thing 
is  well  made. 

Now  in  art  and  literature  there  are, 
broadly  speaking,  two  ways  in  which 
this  excellent  virtue  of  being  well  made 
reveals  and  reports  itself — a  lower  and 
a  higher  concurrently.  The  chair  I  am 
sitting  in  is  a  remarkably  well-made 
chair.  Its  tenons  and  mortises  fit  with 
precision,  and  though  about  a  century 
and  a  half  old  it  continues  to  fulfil 
without  reproach  all  the  strictly  prosaic 
ends  of  a  chair.  Its  merits  in  that 
respect  are  indeed  the  merits  of  simple, 
honest,  straightforward  prose.  But  it 
has  others.  It  was  conceived,  as  one 
may  say,  in  the  brain  of  a  master  of 


58  PENCRAFT 

noble  chaircraft,  one  Chippendale  to 
wit :  hence  it  has  a  grace  and  harmony 
of  flowing  lines,  a  suavity  of  insinuating 
curves,  which  minister  to  the  chaste 
lust  of  the  eye  in  a  subtle,  unac- 
countable manner,  and  which,  if  they 
be  not  the  poetry  of  the  chair,  are  at 
least  its  rhetoric — a  choice  and  felici- 
tous rhetoric.  And  here  I  should 
greatly  like  to  pause,  and,  if  it  be 
possible,  rescue  this  word  rhetoric  from 
the  evil  habits  into  which  it  has 
latterly  fallen  by  no  innate  fault  of 
its  own.  This  once  quite  honourable 
word  is  now  become  a  term  of  rank 
abuse,  a  portable  handy  missile  to  be 
heaved  at  any  obnoxious  man  of  verse 
who  has  not  founded  himself  altogether 
on  "  Mary  had  a  little  lamb,"  or  the 
"  Songs  of  Innocence,"  or  other  lyrism 
similarly  untainted  with  the  vices  of 
the  rhetorician.  The  simple  truth  is 
that  there  is  a  tinsel  rhetoric  and  there 


PENCRAFT  59 

is  a  golden  rhetoric.  Our  Bible  is 
richly  veined  with  the  latter  sort,  and 
the  view,  now  so  common,  that  poetry 
and  rhetoric  are  incompatible,  or  at 
any  rate  mutually  antagonistic,  would 
be  hard  to  maintain  in  presence  of  the 
major  prophets  and  the  royal  psalmo- 
dist.  The  exact  boundaries  of  rhetoric 
and  poetry — if  they  have  them — are 
by  no  means  easy  to  define,  but  the 
truth  seems  to  be  that  the  very  purest 
poetry  of  all  —  not  necessarily  the 
grandest — is  unrhetorical.  They  "were 
lovely  and  pleasant  in  their  lives,  and 
in  their  death  they  are  not  divided  " — 
that  is  quite  unrhetorical.  It  is  an 
unadorned  statement  of  things  too 
beautiful  to  need  adornment,  and  is 
no  doubt  very  pure  poetry.  But  "  The 
dayspring  from  on  high  hath  visited 
us "  partakes  distinctly  of  rhetoric, 
not  even  escaping  a  faint  touch  of  the 
vertuose  in  the  word  visited,  used  here 


60  PENCRAFT 

in  a  very  Shakespearian  way.1  Yet  he 
would  be  a  bold  man  who  should  deny 
that  it  is  exalted  poetry.  '  He  led 
captivity  captive  "  is  rhetoric  as  out- 
and-out  as  it  could  possibly  be,  but  is 
also  poetry  of  a  majestic  and  moving 
character.  Sometimes  we  meet  with 
an  unadorned  statement  clinched  by  a 
rhetorical  one.  "  He  was  wounded 
for  our  transgressions "  is  an  un- 
adorned statement ;  but  the  words 
almost  instantly  following  it—  "  and 
with  his  stripes  we  are  healed " 
whether  poetry  or  not,  are  indubitably 
rhetoric,  and^are  memorable  and  very 
enforcing.  These  examples  present 
themselves  unsought  and  might  be 
multiplied  without  end,  but  to  do  so 
is  needless.  It  is  plain  that  the  sub- 
limest  Hebrew  seers,  in  their  equip- 

1  Compare  "the  ruddy  drops  That  visit  this  sad 
heart,"  "And  there  is  nothing  left  remarkable 
Beneath  the  visiting  moon,"  etc. 


PENCRAFT  61 

ment  and  accoutring,  drew  freely  and 
without  shame  upon  the  armoury  of 
literary  art  and  artifice,  taking  care 
that  the  sword  of  the  spirit,  besides 
being  keen,  should  be  wrought  beauti- 
fully, and  its  hilt  encrusted  with  gems. 
To  come  down  from  Zion  to  less 
awesome  places, — the  analogy  of  the 
Chippendale  chair,  the  more  we  con- 
sider it,  is  the  better  seen  to  be  valid 
and  assisting.  The  two  processes  which 
have  gone  to  the  making  of  the  chair 
—that  which  aimed  at  beauty  and  that 
which  aimed  at  utility — may  seem  at 
first  sight  to  have  been  collateral, 
parallel,  and  therefore  separate  :  they 
have  really  been  so  intimately  con- 
certed as  to  be  in  effect  one  and  in- 
divisible. And  in  like  manner  inter- 
wound,  or,  let  us  say,  blissfully  inter- 
clasped,  are  the  glory  of  phrase  and  the 
bare  logical  framework  of  sense  and 
meaning  in  some  noble  passage  of 


62  PENCRAFT 

Shakespeare,  except  that  a  vastly 
more  powerful  agent  of  fusion  has  here 
been  at  work.  Tennyson  speaks  of  a 
tempest 

"  In  which  the  bounds  of  earth  and  heaven 
were  lost." 

If  we  compare  logical  sense  and  mean- 
ing to  earth,  and  Shakespearian  glory 
of  phrase  to  heaven,  it  is  just  in  this 
way  that  their  bounds  also  are  seen 
to  have  been  lost  when  an  electric 
storm  of  emotion  has  obliterated  them. 
But  the  things  themselves  are  more 
than  intervolved  ;  they  are  consub- 
stantial  and  connative,  and  while  we 
cannot  say  of  the  logic  that  it  was 
"  created  first,"  like  Adam  in  Paradise, 
much  less  can  we  say  of  the  glory  that 

it  was 

"  after  made, 
Occasionally," 

as  Milton,  with  a  little  uncourtliness, 


PENCRAFT  63 

affirms  of  Adam's  helpmeet.  And  here 
the  word  made  brings  us  back,  op- 
portunely enough,  to  the  point  whence 
we  started — the  point  where  I  spoke 
of  those  qualities  in  a  piece  of  literature 
which,  when  we  see  them  in  some 
material  object,  we  are  in  the  habit 
of  summing  up  by  saying  that  the 
thing  has  been  well  made. 

Venice  Preserved  is  a  well-made  play, 
but  is  nevertheless,  as  literature,  if  not 
dead,  at  least  long  withered  from 
robust  life.  Julius  Ccesar  is  an  ill- 
made  play,  but  nevertheless,  as  litera- 
ture, is  all  astir  with  vitality.  Still  it 
is  probable  that  if  the  Shakespearian 
work,  besides  being  lusty  with  natural 
sap,  had  been  as  well  made  as  the 
Otwegian,  it  would  now  rank  among 
its  creator's  masterpieces,  which  a 
radical  unsoundness  of  dramatic  struc- 
ture forbids  it  to  do.  Thus  has  violated 
Form  avenged  herself  ;  and  literature 


64  PENCRAFT 

is  strewn  with  the  memorials  of  her 
vindictiveness.  Consider  the  case  of 
Donne.  His  best  poems  abound  in 
meat  and  marrow.  He  had  a  temper 
as  remarkable  for  emotional  intensity 
as  for  intellectual  subtlety.  Until 
disease — perhaps  the  Nemesis  of  his 
torrid  youth — had  wasted  his  body  he 
seems  to  have  been  in  a  very  high 
degree  what  Tennyson  said  that  John 
Richard  Green  was — "  a  vivid  man." 
His  thick,  choked  utterance  cannot 
disguise  the  force  and  ardency  of  his 
nature.  At  their  smokiest  and  sootiest 
his  suffocated  fires  crackle  and  explode 
into  sudden  surprising  flame.  But 
scarcely  anything  had  the  luck  to 
come  shapen  aright  out  of  that  forge. 
His  uncouthness  really  passes  tolera- 
tion, and,  with  a  strange  irony,  has 
condemned  this  man,  so  "  vivid  "  in 
his  life,  to  the  driest  and  dustiest 
kind  of  embalmment— he  is  read  by 


PENCRAFT  65 

the  literary  student  only  !  Professor 
Grierson,  who  not  long  ago  rendered 
Donne  the  invaluable  service  of  editing 
his  poems  with  an  enthusiasm  only 
equalled  by  his  erudition  and  acumen, 
has  explored  every  nook  of  this  poet's 
rugged  and  volcanic  landscape,  and 
has  applied  to  some  of  its  tangled 
thickets  an  ingenious  system  of  metrical 
guide-posts,  so  that  the  wayfaring 
man,  though  a  fool,  shall  not  err 
therein.  They  enable  us  to  wrestle 
more  successfully  with  a  versification 
which  in  its  supreme  crabbedness  must 
be  the  envy  of  one  or  two  living 
practitioners ;  but  even  with  these 
amenities  of  travel  the  region  will 
never  attract  any  but  the  hardier 
kind  of  tourist. 

Such  is  the  doom  that  overtakes 
whatever  is  flagrantly  ill  made.  But 
there  are  literary  products  which  are 
not  so  much  ill  made  as  undermade  ; 


66  PENCRAFT 

and  quite  as  truly  there  are  others  of 
which  the  fatal  vice  is  that  they  are 
overmade.  Some  of  the  poetry  of 
Rossetti  has  manifestly  this  vice  ;  he 
seems  to  be  brandishing  before  us  the 
rich  effects  of  sound  and  colour  which 
he  can  undoubtedly  obtain  from  words. 
The  poetry  of  Byron,  on  the  other 
hand,  suffers  too  often  from  the  op- 
posite fault ;  with  all  its  abundant 
force  and  flow  and  glow  it  is  not  made 
enough,  it  is  undermade.  And  nearly 
all  mediocre  poetry,  of  the  kind  which 
not  seldom  has  a  certain  lease  of 
popularity  and  is  for  a  time  carelessly 
confused  with  finer  work,  has  the 
same  defect.  The  metrical  writings  of 
Robert  Buchanan  illustrate  this.  He 
was  a  man  of  pith  and  power,  whose 
verse  well  reflects  his  energy  and 
fecundity  of  mind  ;  but  the  thing  is 
undermade.  The  work  of  nearly  all 
the  American  poets  of  Lowell's  genera- 


PENCRAFT  67 

tion  suffers  in  the  same  way.  Bryant 
is  a  good  example.  His  poetry  has  not 
had  enough  milling.  Even  of  Lowell 
himself  this  is  usually  true.  Most 
of  his  poems  would  gain  by  being 
kneaded  down  to  about  one-fourth  of 
their  present  dimensions,  their  in- 
nutritive  and  merely  aqueous  con- 
stituents getting  pressed  out  in  the 
process,  and  only  a  quintessential 
residuum  surviving  this  beneficent 
ruthlessness.  Edgar  Poe,  on  the  con- 
trary, is  perhaps  the  great  example  of 
how  a  man  of  genius  can  sometimes 
ruin  his  work  by  overmaking  it ;  his 
Ulalume  is  in  that  respect  a  warning 
to  all  time.  It  is  worth  noting  that 
America  had,  at  about  the  same 
period,  another  poet,  now  forgotten — 
Chivers — of  whom  I  have  been  told 
that  Swinburne  was  once  in  the  habit, 
privately,  of  likening  his  verse  to  that 
of  the  late  Francis  Thompson  (with 


68  PENCRAFT 

obvious  injustice  to  the  latter)  and 
whose  diction  was  a  very  riot  and  orgy 
of  the  overmaker's  really  unartful  art. 
But  without  multiplying  instances  of 
the  two  extremes — the  overmade  and 
the  undermade — one  may  say  that 
between  them,  and  with  a  reasonable 
prospect  of  outliving  both,  there  re- 
mains the  work  that  stands  the  ancient 
and  not  yet  obsolete  tests  applied  to  all 
products  of  human  effort  and  human 
intelligence,  the  work  that  is  made 
enough  and  not  more  than  enough, 
neither  deformed  by  excessive  ver- 
tuosity  like  some  of  Rossetti's  poems, 
nor  flung  out  too  palpably  in  the 
unsmelted  ore  stage,  like  some  of 
Byron's.  It  is  work  which  owes  its 
aesthetic  excellence  in  great  measure 
to  what  I  must  call  a  moral  root  and 
basis — the  wholly  honourable  passion 
of  the  workman  for  levying  upon  his 
own  spirit  the  utmost  toll  it  can  bear 


PENCRAFT  69 

without  impoverishment,  and  for  doing 
as  well  as  nature  and  circumstance 
permit  him  whatsoever  thing  he  strives 
to  do  at  all. 

To  me,  the  mere  masterly  fashioning, 
by  another  labourer,  of  any  piece  of 
pencraft,  be  it  what  it  may,  is  some- 
thing which  in  itself  provides  a  capti- 
vating and  exciting  spectacle ;  so 
much  so  that  in  early  manhood, 
though  not  greatly  given  to  the  re- 
laxation afforded  by  fiction,  I  read  with 
avidity  the  works  of  a  novelist — Wilkie 
Collins — whose  mind  soared  to  no 
great  heights  and  whose  characters 
themselves  had  no  very  deep  fascina- 
tion for  me,  but  whose  astonishing 
adroitness  and  legerdemain,  whose 
Arachnean  skill  as  a  weaver  of  intricate 
mysteries,  whose  engineering  feats, 
whose  perfect  knowledge  of  what  it 
was  that  he  sought  to  compass,  and 
whose  equally  perfect  ability  to  com- 


70  PENCRAFT 

pass  it,  were  a  source  of  unfailing 
delight  and  wonder.  Now  it  would  be 
idle  to  expect  that  this  special  interest, 
aroused  in  one  kind  of  literary  worker 
by  the  technique  and  apparatus  of 
another,  should  be  intimately  shared 
by  the  average  intelligent  reader,  who 
neither  aspires  nor  condescends  to  be 
a  literary  worker  at  all.  In  such 
matters  it  obviously  behoves  the  writer 
of  this  essay  to  recognise  that  his  own 
habit  and  posture  of  mind  are  largely 
professional ;  perhaps  not  free  from 
the  narrowness  which  professionalism 
is  often  alleged  to  engender  :  and  he 
begs  leave  to  speak  quite  frankly  as 
one  who,  without  making  any  merit  of 
it,  is  conscious  of  having  had  from 
earliest  youth  a  much  more  than 
ordinary  susceptibility  to  literary  in- 
fluences and  impressions  ;  as  one  who, 
for  example,  can  remember  to  this  day 
not  only  the  persons  and  incidents,  but 


PENCRAFT  71 

even  much  of  the  language,  of  Bunyan's 
great  allegorical  romance,  which  he 
read  through  at  the  age  of  six,  for  the 
pure  delight  of  it,  and  has  never  looked 
at  since.  But  while  making  due  avowal 
of  professionalism,  and  disclaiming 
any  tendency  to  demand  of  others  the 
like  attitude  of  mind,  he  wishes  never- 
theless to  affirm  his  belief  that  the 
average  intelligent  reader,  when  suf- 
fered to  find  his  own  natural  polarity 
in  matters  of  taste,  has  a  far  keener 
sense  and  a  far  livelier  enjoyment  of  the 
qualities  of  workmanlike  form  and 
facture  in  literary  products  than  it  is 
usual  to  attribute  to  him.  It  can 
scarcely  be  an  accident  that  for  some 
three  generations,  if  not  precisely  at 
the  present  time,  the  most  popular 
poem  in  our  language  was  the  in- 
comparable Elegy  written  in  a  Country 
Churchyard;  a  poem  in  which  genius 
co-operated  with  inerrant  taste,  with 


72  PENCRAFT 

profound  culture,  with  infinite  labori- 
ousness,  and  with  tenderest  human 
sympathy,  to  produce  a  miracle  of 
faultless  craftsmanship,  and  in  which 
art  achieved  that  proverbial  last  per- 
fection, its  own  invisibility. 

But  this  natural  polarity  is  the  very 
last  thing  which  criticism  permits  the 
plain  man  to  find  or  rest  in.  For 
criticism,  to  maintain  itself  in  power, 
is  under  strong  temptation  to  consort 
with  ideas,  and  lean  on  principles, 
which  in  its  heart  of  hearts  it  knows 
to  be  putrid  with  fallacy,  but  which 
far  surpass  truths  in  the  opportunities 
they  afford  it  for  impressive  self- 
display  ;  and  such  ideas  and  principles 
are  necessarily  of  a  kind  most  dis- 
turbing to  the  plain  man's  faith,  which 
it  is  their  very  business  and  mission 
to  unsettle.  In  the  realm  over  which 
criticism  presides — and  this  applies 
especially  to  the  criticism  of  poetry — 


PENCRAFT  73 

the  reins  of  government  sometimes 
fall  into  the  hands  of  a  camarilla  ;  and 
though  such  is  not  the  case  at  the 
present  time — though  what  we  now 
see  is  rather  a  loosely  administered 
State  in  which  various  groups  and 
parties,  less  clearly  demarcated  than 
fluid  and  fluctuant  of  outline,  hold 
each  other  in  comparative  equilibrium 
—it  is  none  the  less  true  that  these 
groups  and  parties  have  the  common 
interest  of  a  caste  or  order  in  allowing 
great  affairs  to  be  transacted  over  the 
heads  of  the  multitude  :  they  have  all 
united,  actively  or  tacitly,  in  assisting 
the  passage  of  legislation — sometimes 
revolutionary  legislation  —  which  no 
parliament  of  critics  in  any  other  age 
would  have  sanctioned  or  even  seri- 
ously discussed ;  they  have  all  ac- 
cepted as  articles  of  faith  what  no 
general  assembly  of  their  predecessors 
would  have  consented,  or  even  come 


74  PENCRAFT 

within  sight  of  consenting,  to  embody 
in  their  creed. 

They  have  been  most  hospitable 
to  heresies ;  they  have  not  only  re- 
ceived them  in  their  houses,  they  have 
gone  out  to  their  gates  to  welcome 
with  embraces  these  sometimes  treach- 
erous guests.  I  have  specially  in  my 
mind  at  this  moment  the  doctrine 
which,  having  regard  to  its  far-reaching 
and  permeative  effects,  I  am  disposed 
to  call  the  great  modern  heresy  in 
criticism  ;  the  doctrine  which  perhaps 
finds  its  ablest,  most  plausible,  and 
most  seductive  expression  in  Brown- 
ing's poem  of  Andrea  del  Sarto. 

In  this  remarkable  and  fascinating 
poem  its  author,  using  a  poet's  liberty 
and  endowing  "  Andrew  the  Tailor's 
Son  "  with  perhaps  a  loftier  refine- 
ment and  delicacy  of  mental  con- 
stitution than  the  known  facts  of  his 
career  have  altogether  prepared  us  for, 


PENCRAFT  75 

makes  of  him  the  mouthpiece  of  a 
philosophy  which  in  its  immediate 
reference  is  concerned  solely  with 
Painting,  but  was  doubtless  meant  by 
Browning  to  have  a  very  catholic 
application  to  the  major  arts.  It  is  a 
philosophy  which  has  not  succeeded 
in  imbuing  to  any  great  extent  the 
criticism  of  either  Painting,  Sculpture, 
or  Architecture  :  perhaps  their  openly 
ocular  appeal,  and  the  tangible,  pre- 
hensible  nature  of  their  means  and 
paraphernalia,  tend  to  create  an  at- 
mosphere unfavourable  to  the  evasions 
and  subterfuges  on  which  it  relies ; 
but  it  colours  deeply  the  prevalent 
aesthetics  of  poetry  ;  there,  the  reign- 
ing theories  are  of  its  house  and 
kindred  :  and  for  these  reasons  I  shall 
take  the  liberty  to  give  it  respectful 
but  somewhat  scrutinising  attention. 
Addressing  his  wife,  Lucrezia,  the 
painter  through  whom  Browning  has 


76  PENCRAFT 

chosen  to  utter  his  own  ideas  points  to 
a  work  of  Raphael's,  and  descants 
with  emotion  on  the  fervour  and 
enthusiasm  with  which  that  master, 
working  under  the  applauding  eyes 
of  rulers  and  pontiffs,  has  evidently 
painted  it : 

"  Reaching,  that  heaven  might  so  replenish 

him, 
Above  and  through  his  art — for  it  gives 

way; 

That  arm  is  wrongly  put — and  there  again — 
A  fault  to  pardon  in  the  drawing's  lines, 
Its  body,  so  to  speak  :  its  soul  is  right, 
He  means  right — that,  a  child  may  under- 
stand ; 

Still,  what  an  arm  !  and  I  could  alter  it : 
But    all    the   play,    the   insight,    and    the 

stretch — 
Out  of  me,  out  of  me  !  " 

So  far,  all  is  clear,  and  cogent  enough 
in  the  main,  Andrea  but  testifying  to 
the  might  and  glory  of  such  genius  as 


PENCRAFT  77 

imperiously  sweeps  the  petty  fault- 
finder off  his  feet,  the  genius  to  which 
full-blooded  transgressions  are  per- 
mitted, as  libertinism  is  winked  at  in 
kings.  But  unhappily  he  goes  much 
further.  In  another  passage,  after 
affirming  with  perfect  truth  : 

"  I  do  what  many  dream  of  all  their  lives, 
— Dream  ?  strive  to  do,  and  agonise  to  do, 
And  fail  in  doing," — 

after  telling  Lucrezia  that  he  "  could 
count  twenty  such,"  in  Florence  alone, 
who  strive,  and  strive,  and  with  all 
their  striving  achieve  less — "  so  much 
less  !  " — than  he  can  compass  almost 
without  effort,  he  continues  : 

"  Well,  less  is  more,  Lucrezia  ;  I  am  judged. 
There  burns  a  truer  light  of  God  in  them, 
In  their  vexed  beating  stuffed  and  stopped- 

up  brain, 
Heart,  or  whate'er  else,  than  goes  on  to 

prompt 


78  PENCRAFT 

This  low-pulsed  forthright  craftsman's  hand 
of  mine. 

Their  work  drops  groundward,  but  them- 
selves, I  know, 

Reach  many  a  time  a  heaven  that's  shut  to 
me, 

Enter  and  take  their  place  there  sure 
enough, 

Though  they  come  back  and  cannot  tell  the 
world." 

The  expression  here  is  lucid  enough  ; 
the  thought  is  hopelessly  confused. 
For  if  these  men's  work  is  of  non-effect, 
if  it  "  drops  groundward,"  as  he  says, 
while  they  themselves  soar  into  heaven, 
their  celestial  adventures,  though 
doubtless  for  themselves  a  most  in- 
teresting experience,  can  have  been  of 
singularly  little  value  to  others,  or 
to  their  own  work,  since  the  latter 
admittedly  preserves  no  reflection  of 
what  they  have  been  privileged  to  see  : 
they  "  come  back  and  cannot  tell  the 


PENCRAFT  79 

world."  It  may  be  that  "  there  burns 
a  truer  light  of  God  in  them  "  than  in 
the  "  Faultless  Painter  "  whom  Brown- 
ing has  made  their  apologist,  but  to  us 
the  light  is  worthless  if  it  be  promptly 
snuffed  out  the  moment  they  attempt 
to  illume  with  it  their  handiwork — 
the  only  bridge,  and  a  tottering  one, 
by  which  their  minds  can  ever  com- 
municate with  ours.  And  a  little 
wayward,  is  it  not,  on  our  Andrea's 
part,  to  treat  with  contumely,  in 
himself,  the  limitations  which  have  not 
barred  him  from  producing  works  of 
noble  beauty,  while  treating  with 
reverence,  in  others,  the  limitations 
which  on  his  own  showing  have  alto- 
gether stultified,  sterilised,  and  doomed 
to  a  miserable  impotence,  the  souls 
afflicted  with  them  ?  Nay,  what  ser- 
vice is  rendered  to  art  itself  by  en- 
couraging its  poor  ineffectuals,  lame 
and  tongue-tied  from  the  womb,  to 


8o  PENCRAFT 

cherish  frustration  as  a  gift,  and 
cultivate  inarticulacy  as  a  virtue  ? 
Art  is  not  morals,  in  which  the  will 
may  sometimes  count  for  more  than 
the  deed,  and  the  widow's  mite  may 
overtop  the  rich  man's  munificence  ; 
nor  is  it  a  religion,  in  which  even  faith 
without  works  may  perhaps  be  allowed 
some  measure  of  spiritual  efficacy. 
Works  impassionated  by  faith,  ir- 
radiated by  truth,  but  above  all, 
consummated  by  power,  are  its  only 
stepping-stones  to  salvation. 

Artists  of  serene  accomplishment  but 
not  too  abounding  afflatus,  the  Men- 
delssohns  of  their  respective  pro- 
vinces, are  seldom  observed  to  be 
palpitating  with  sympathy  for  either 
merits  or  defects  of  opposite  character 
to  their  own,  and  I  am  not  sure  that  it 
was  very  true  to  human  nature  to  put 
the  great  "  less  is  more  "  doctrine,  as 
Browning  does,  into  the  mouth  of  an 


PENCRAFT  81 

artist  of  just  that  order,  who  is  made 
to  preach  it  with  a  propagandist's 
fervour  and  zeal.  But  without  pur- 
suing this  question  one  may  perhaps 
enquire  whether  we  are  really  war- 
ranted in  attributing,  to  the  great 
Deviser  and  Designer  of  souls,  a  kind 
of  impish  fondness  for  yoking  divine 
power  of  vision  with  abject  palsy  of 
speech,  and  whether  in  like  manner 
it  is  his  wilful  habit  to  penalise  with 
impotence  of  vision  the  masters  of 
utterance.  And  do  we  greatly  honour 
the  Lifegiver  by  imputing  to  him  the 
caprice  of  having  made  feebleness  of 
insight  and  poverty  of  spirit  the  natural 
concomitants  of  high  executive  faculty, 
of  that  gift  of  moulding  words  or 
colours  or  tones  into  forms  of  beauty, 
a  gift  in  which  also  one  had  thought 
there  was  something  divine,  some 
shadow  of  the  Creative  Puissance  that 
fashioned  the  fashioner  ? 


82  PENCRAFT 

To  narrow  the  ground  of  argument, 
and  so  perhaps  bring  matters  to  a 
simpler  test,  let  us  take  the  case  of 
portraiture,  a  branch  of  art  with  well- 
defined  aims,  directed  less  towards 
creation  than  towards  perception, 
statement,  and,  when  it  performs  its 
deeper  functions,  psychologic  inter- 
pretation and  perhaps  moral  comment. 
I  stood,  not  long  ago,  before  the  por- 
trait of  Henry  VIII  by  Holbein  which 
is  preserved  at  Berkeley  Castle.  It 
looks  as  if  painted  yesterday,  so  sound 
are  the  pigments  and  so  thorough  the 
technical  means  which  the  artist  em- 
ployed ;  and  in  every  line  and  tint 
of  it  an  absolute  unfaltering  command 
of  the  resources  of  his  craft  is  legible. 
But  this  confident  mastery  of  process 
and  material,  is  it  bought  at  the 
expense  of  deeper  and  more  inward 
qualities  ?  On  the  contrary,  the  pic- 
ture is  all  alive  with  subtle  character- 


PENCRAFT  83 

reading  and  character-rendering.  The 
man  Henry  Tudor  is  there,  thoroughly 
perused  and  convincingly  presented 
by  the  limner,  who  has  limned  his 
soul.  There,  in  his  strength,  his 
vanity,  his  odious  handsomeness,  the 
King  smiles  for  ever  his  detestable 
smile  :  the  man  who  made  Statecraft 
a  go-between  in  his  amours,  and 
Religion  a  procuress  ;  the  wretch  who 
arrayed  himself,  on  the  morrow  of  his 
first  wife-murder,  in  a  suit  of  unsullied 
white,  as  if  the  better  to  show  forth 
by  contrast  the  corruption  of  his  soul 
and  the  hue  of  his  bloody  hands.  All 
this  and  much  more  is  there,  told  with- 
out any  stammer,  told  with  unimpeded 
and  perfectly  limpid  speech.  For  it 
would  not  seem  to  have  been  Holbein's 
theory  of  art  that  if  "  its  soul  is  right  " 
its  body  may  be  neglected  at  discretion. 
Rather,  perhaps,  would  he  have  said  : 
"  Tend  well  its  body,  which  mischance 


84  PENCRAFT 

or  unheed  can  so  easily  injure,  lest  you 
do  to  its  soul  the  gross  wrong  of 
tethering  her  for  life  to  a  body  ailing 
or  deformed."  When  I  turn  from 
works  like  the  productions  of  this 
master  to  those — not  necessarily  of  the 
pencil  or  the  brush — in  which  a  certain 
turbid  imaginative  faculty  struggles 
vainly  towards  expression,  there  arise 
in  my  mind  the  words  of  the  son  of 
Ahaz  :  "  The  children  are  come  to  the 
birth,  but  there  is  not  strength  to 
bring  forth."  What  is  it  to  me  that 
they  are  perhaps  the  children  of  deep 
and  ardent  passion  ?  My  interest  is 
in  the  children  that  are  fully  born,  not 
those  in  the  antenatal  stage.  Brown- 
ing's aesthetics  are  a  kind  which,  when 
I  ask  for  offspring,  mock  me  with  a 
foetus.  It  is  best  to  look  this  whole 
matter  straight  in  the  face.  Genius 
that  lacks  the  capacity  of  delivering 
itself  is  a  contradiction  in  terms,  for  to 


PENCRAFT  85 

all  genius  the  very  condition  of  its 
being  is  the  power  to  bring  forth  what 
progeny  soever  it  has  conceived. 
Parturition  is  not  genius,  nor  is  gesta- 
tion art. 

In  this  essay,  purporting  to  deal  with 
matters  to  which  I  have  given  the  very 
comprehensive  name  of  pencraft,  the 
reader  will  have  noticed,  perhaps  not 
without  a  murmur,  that  the  foreground 
of  discussion  is  mostly  occupied  with 
poetry,  and  with  questions  and  con- 
troversies having  poetry  for  their 
centre.  It  is  the  art  with  which  the 
public  is  least  disinclined  to  admit 
that  I  have  a  little  acquaintance ; 
hence  the  space  filled  by  it  and  its 
adjuncts  in  these  pages.  It  is  likewise, 
if  I  do  not  err,  the  art  in  which,  or  in 
the  criticism  of  which,  the  Andrean 
heresy  to  which  I  have  just  been  giving 
some  examination  has  obtained  its 
firmest  foothold.  Elsewhere  I  do  not 


86  PENCRAFT 

see  much  evidence  of  the  triumph  of 
that  great  and  most  consolatory  doc- 
trine that  the  impulse  and  the  in- 
tention are  all.  In  the  sphere  of  the 
novelist,  for  example,  vision  and  passion 
are  not  yet  thought  to  render  narration 
superfluous ;  and  in  one  branch  of 
fiction — that  of  the  short  story — con- 
structive and  executive  capacity,  high 
manipulative  skill,  a  glorified  sleight  of 
hand,  seem  especially  assured  of  their 
dues  :  witness  the  admiration  justly 
lavished  upon  such  masterpieces  as  the 
Rappacini's  Daughter  of  Hawthorne, 
The  Gold  Bug  of  Poe,  or  the  Wandering 
Willie's  Tale  of  Scott,  upon  Bulwer's 
fantasy  The  Haunters  and  the  Haunted, 
or  Stevenson's  excellent  nightmare  of 
Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde.  In  all  these, 
not  only  is  the  fabric  extraordinarily 
firm,  but  the  style,  too,  is  eminently 
workmanlike — in  nothing  more  so  than 
in  its  being  just  an  obedient  instrument 


PENCRAFT  87 

and  servitor,  not  leading  the  way,  not 
snatching  the  initiative,  as  the  brilliant 
style  of  Meredith  sometimes  threatens 
to  do.  And  here  I  may  perhaps  hazard 
a  comment  upon  a  style  which  seems 
to  be  gaining  ground  in  some  literary 
circles.  I  beg  their  pardon :  they 
would  probably  scorn  to  be  described 
by  "  that  now  discredited  word 
literary."  I  allude  to  a  style  apparently 
reflected  from  the  reposeless  journalese 
in  which  a  bullet  invariably  sings,  an 
aeroplane  never  forgets  to  drone,  and  a 
shell  can  be  trusted  at  all  times  to 
scream.  It  is  a  style  which  in  its 
misguided  efforts  to  make  a  direct 
appeal  to  the  sensorium  is  like  a  lec- 
turer supplementing  his  oratory  with  a 
magic  lantern  and  a  gramophone. 
A  great  deal  of  work  infected  with  this 
mannerism  comes  from  America  ;  a 
great  deal  more  of  it,  I  am  glad  to 
think,  stays  there.  It  is  rife  in  all  the 


88  PENCRAFT 

American  magazines,  with  one  or  two 
distinguished  but  perhaps  not  too 
popular  exceptions.  Let  me  say  here 
that  I  am  not  one  of  those  who  use 
the  word  English  as  if  by  universal 
admission  it  necessarily  connoted 
everything  on  earth  that  is  superior. 
Such  a  use  of  it  was  observed  and 
genially  recorded  several  centuries  ago 
by  that  secretary  to  a  Venetian  am- 
bassador who  in  the  account  he  pub- 
lished of  "  the  Isle  of  England  "  wrote 
regarding  its  people  :  '  When  they 
wish  to  convey  that  a  person  is  hand- 
some they  say  he  is  like  an  English- 
man." 

I  cannot  plead  guilty  of  the  amiable 
but  slightly  absurd  foible  of  using 
the  word  English  and  its  cognates 
in  that  way,  but  I  do  most  assuredly 
hold  that  in  the  period  when  American 
literature,  more  touched  with  filial 
piety,  more  given  to  walk  in  the 


PENCRAFT  89 

footprints  of  its  fathers  than  it  is  to- 
day— less  proudly  unwilling  to  owe  a 
little  to  the  past,  less  scornful  of  the 
gracious  sanctions  of  Time  and  con- 
suetude— was  also  less  furiously  bent 
upon  being  at  all  costs  indigenous ; 
when  it  saw  no  shame  in  bearing  some 
such  relation  to  the  literature  of  Great 
Britain  as  that  of  Rome  bore  to  that 
of  Greece  ;  in  a  word,  when  it  was 
more  English  in  texture  and  mode  than 
it  is  at  present,  its  level  of  performance 
was  incomparably  higher.  Since  that 
period  —  the  rich,  mellow,  humane 
period  of  Hawthorne,  Longfellow, 
Emerson,  Holmes,  and  all  their  elect 
fraternity — the  America  whose  an- 
cestral roots  were  mainly,  and  mani- 
festly, in  these  islands  has  given  place 
to  an  America  whose  parent  stem  is  fast 
being  hidden  by  the  multitude  of  its 
graftlings  ;  and  whether  it  be  accident 
or  not,  the  change  has  certainly  coin- 


90  PENCRAFT 

cided  with  a  marked  decline  in  literary 
prestige  and  power  ;  so  marked  that 
America  has  not  at  the  present  moment 
a  single  author  whose  works  are 
awaited  as  stirring  events  by  a  public 
at  once  intelligent  and  large,  outside 
her  own  borders.  To  say  this  of  the 
greatest  English-speaking  community 
in  the  world  is  to  make  no  slight 
allegation,  nor  is  it  made  with  any  zest, 
any  gusto,  in  these  pages.  Their 
writer  relishes  far  more  the  opportunity 
and  duty  of  bearing  witness  to  the 
immensely  wide  diffusion  among  all 
classes  in  the  United  States  of  a  real 
and  lively  interest  in  the  affairs  of  the 
pen,  as  contrasted  with  the  lamentably 
narrow  area  within  which  that  interest 
is  confined  in  his  own  country.  But 
this  widespread  literary  impressibility, 
noted  with  such  pleasure  and  envy 
by  the  cultivated  English  visitor  to 
the  United  States,  is  coupled  with  a 


PENCRAFT  91 

good  deal  of  crude  and  indiscriminating 
judgment.  There  is  in  America,  for 
instance,  a  really  surprising  consump- 
tion of  homegrown  verse,  but  the  taste 
it  satisfies  is,  to  state  it  temperately, 
not  severe.  It  is  verse  which  has  often 
what  can  perhaps  be  best  described  as 
an  uncouth  sincerity.  There  is  a 
residue,  however,  of  much  abler, 
choicer,  more  distinguished  work,  but 
it  is  apt  to  be  less  ingenuous.  Its 
writers,  like  certain  gifted  young  poets 
amongst  ourselves,  sometimes  engage 
in  the  quest  of  singularity,  and  permit 
themselves  to  be  diverted  from  objects 
worthier  of  their  pursuit.  Sometimes 
they  seem  to  compete  in  breaking  with 
precedent  and  washing  their  hands  of 
tradition  ;  and  the  latter  exercise  is 
necessarily  a  violent  kind  of  ablution, 
at  least  as  roughening  as  it  is  purifica- 
tory. One  remarkable  fact  demands 
record  :  although  the  American  mind 


92  PENCRAFT 

is  now  far  more  cosmopolitan  than 
formerly,  American  poetry,  to-day,  as 
compared  with  that  of  fifty  years  ago, 
has  an  emphatically  more  provincial 
note.  In  some  degree  this  is  also  true 
of  American  fiction,  its  living  masters 
showing  little  faculty  of  so  dealing 
with  local  truth  as  to  mobilise  it  for 
universal  conquest.  Altogether,  both 
as  regards  the  bypaths  and  the  broader 
ways,  the  present  state  of  American 
literature  proves  only  too  well  that 
the  forces  which  have  conspired  in 
making  the  amplest,  most  unfettered 
experiment  in  democracy  the  world 
has  ever  seen  are  powerless  to  guarantee 
the  richer  fruition  of  the  human  spirit. 
Their  failure  to  do  so  teaches  the 
lesson  that  the  most  victorious  national 
life,  its  development  wondrously 
abetted  by  nature  and  fortune,  its 
resources  matchless  and  its  energies 
boundless,  may  achieve  almost  every- 


PENCRAFT  93 

thing,  yet  lack  the  crowning  glory  and 
wealth  of  a  golden  tongue. 

Social,  political,  economic  influences 
—these  can  choke  or  sully  the  well- 
heads of  noble  literature  ;  they  cannot 
decree  its  gushing  forth  when  an 
unknown  subterranean  power  freezes 
and  holds  it  captive.  They  can,  how- 
ever, facilitate  its  upward  passage 
when  it  is  plainly  seen  to  be  battling 
for  egress  ;  they  can  widen  its  channel 
when  it  has  visibly  emerged  into  the 
light ;  and  during  its  subsequent 
course  as  a  river  gathering  to  itself 
many  tributaries  they  can  do  much 
to  guard  it  from  defilement  and  to 
ensure  that  it  fertilises  and  cheers  the 
land  through  which  it  flows. 

How  far  these  functions  have  re- 
mained active  amongst  us,  or  have 
become  atrophied  from  disuse,  may 
be  gauged  by  a  glance  at  the  state  of 
one  or  two  of  the  tributaries  referred 


94  PENCRAFT 

to  ;  such  as  the  really  live  elements 
in  journalism  and  in  the  vernacular 
of  our  people.  There  must  have  been 
a  deep  instinct  for  beauty  and  order 
in  the  race  that  could  create  so 
magnificent  an  instrument  as  the 
English  language,  but  whether  that 
instinct  has  kept  much  of  its  original 
force  may  well  be  doubted  when  we 
see  the  extraordinary  preference  for 
the  lower  levels  of  speech,  the  depraved 
love  of  the  unlovely  in  word  and  phrase, 
nay,  the  unchecked  and  applauded 
search  for  verbal  ugliness,  which  are 
among  the  signs  of  our  times.  To  take 
a  single  instance  :  the  sons  of  British 
and  IrislTmothers,  and  of  their  ocean- 
parted  kin,  are  at  this  moment  showing 
themselves  rich  in  one  of  the  noblest 
human  qualities,  a  quality  for  which 
our  language  has  some  beautiful  names, 
such  as  courage,  daring,  valour,  bravery, 
dauntlessness,  besides  others  not  quite 


PENCRAFT  95 

so  beautiful  but  still  fair.  And  with 
all  these  words  to  choose  from  we  go 
out  of  our  way  to  bestow  upon  this 
radiant  virtue  of  intrepidity  one  of 
the  ugliest  substantives  our  language 
affords — pluck  ;  and  we  even  throw  its 
ugliness  into  higher  relief  by  often 
attaching  to  it  the  incongruously 
splendid  adjective  indomitable.  During 
recent  months  I  have  seen,  in  some 
newspapers  widely  read  by  our  least 
literate  classes,  certain  articles  which, 
while  giving  what  I  do  not  doubt  to  have 
been  truthful  stories  of  the  battlefield, 
were  a  sheer  revel  of  almost  incredibly 
hideous  speech,  the  writers  seeming 
to  rake  into  print  every  squalid  col- 
loquialism, every  baseborn  neologism, 
which  the  vocabulary  of  the  un- 
educated can  supply.  There  is,  of 
course,  no  propriety  in  mating  majestic 
words  with  lowly  matters,  but  the 
matters  here  were  not  lowly,  they  were 


96  PENCRAFT 

the  loftiest,  they  were  such  things  as 
heroism,  and  love,  and  sublime  self- 
sacrifice.  One  cannot  always  live  in 
the  palaces  and  state  apartments  of 
language,  but  at  least  we  can  refuse 
to  spend  our  days  in  searching  for  its 
vilest  slums. 

To  leave  the  tributaries  and  return 
to  the  main  stream, — what  is  the  office 
which  we  who  keep  watch  over  literary 
history,  whether  we  have  a  hand  in  its 
making  or  not,  are  entitled  and  quali- 
fied to  perform  at  this  time  ?  It  is  a 
time  which,  in  the  domain  supposed 
to  be  presided  over  by  critical  taste 
and  judgment,  may  be  described  as 
an  era  of  partially  established  govern- 
ance alleviated  by  wholly  optional  sub- 
mission. Let  none  imagine,  because 
this  little  book  reveals  scant  sympathy 
with  what  is  barrenly  violent  and 
erratic,  that  the  author  is  a  mere 
apostle  of  conformity,  his  gospel  one  of 


PENCRAFT  97 

mechanical  obedience  to  supposed 
statute  law.  Literature  lives  by  de- 
fiance as  well  as  by  acquiescence.  Its 
story  has  few  episodes  more  romantic 
than  those  revolts,  whether  against 
some  deadening,  stifling  regime  or 
against  beneficently  wielded  authority, 
those  adventurous  risings,  which  some- 
times prosper  and  are  justified,  and 
sometimes  collapse  in  discredit,  or 
with  the  glamour  of  picturesque  mis- 
fortune. In  such  mutinies  the  primal 
forces  are  not  seldom  unprisoned,  the 
effete  things  are  burned  as  chaff, 
and  splendid  rebel  figures  are  thrown 
up  against  the  flare.  To  apply  to  these 
insurrections  a  policy  of  soulless  re- 
pression would  often  be  to  stamp  on  the 
very  seeds  of  life  and  growth  and  har- 
vest. There  may  even  be  no  honest 
course  for  us,  in  given  circumstances, 
but  to  join  the  insurgents.  What, 
then,  is  the  rock  of  principle  on  which 


98  PENCRAFT 

we  should  take  our  stand  ?  It  is  this  : 
the  recognition  of  an  intellectual  duty 
and  obligation  on  our  part  to  see  to  it 
that  our  very  revolutions,  in  their 
nature  and  purpose,  are  essentially 
movements  toward  order,  not  toward 
anarchy ;  toward  that  happiest  free- 
dom which  rather  welcomes  control  as 
a  support  than  resents  it  as  an  inter- 
ference. It  is  because  I  discern  in 
much  recent  literature  an  opposite 
drift,  away  from  that  true  enfranchise- 
ment, that  I  have  attempted  here  the 
perhaps  hopeless  and  almost  certainly 
thankless  task  of  doing  something, 
however  little,  in  the  direction  of 
counteracting  such  a  tendency. 

No  doubt  a  lorn  adventure,  for  a 
solitary  swordsman  to  throw  himself, 
in  light  armour,  across  the  path  of  the 
prancing  cohorts  !  Likely  enough  he 
will  be  trodden  underfoot,  and  none 
ride  up  to  avenge  him  ;  yet  it  may  well 


PENCRAFT  99 

happen  that  the  need  for  some  other 
and  better  champion  of  a  drooping 
cause  will  hereafter  be  found  even  more 
urgent  than  now.  While  these  words 
are  being  written  the  air  is  still  full  of 
the  clash  and  thunder  of  no  mere 
warfare  of  the  pen.  The  untimely 
night,  the  nox  intempesta  of  rage  and 
slaughter,  is  heavy  upon  us ;  and 
when  it  shall  have  passed,  though  no 
man  can  foresee  what  thoughts  and 
moods  will  then  sway  the  world,  at 
least  they  can  hardly  fail  to  have  in 
them  much  that  will  be  new  and  im- 
periously possessing.  It  is  the  habit 
of  the  human  mind,  in  times  of  the 
surge  and  flooding-in  of  novel  ideas, 
so  to  magnify  their  momentousness, 
and  even  their  novelty,  as  to  hold 
cheap,  if  it  does  not  passionately 
condemn,  all  solicitude  for  the  manner 
of  their  vesture.  Form  becomes 
vanity,  art  is  held  a  bauble,  style  an 


ioo  PENCRAFT 

indulgence  ;  strenuousness  is  all :  and 
that  way  disaster  lies.  For  another 
generation,  coming  with  no  very  vivid 
concern  upon  a  world  of  once  red-hot 
but  by  that  time  sadly  cooled  ideas 
and  emotions,  tenets  and  theories,  is 
revolted  by  their  graceless  present- 
ment and  turns  from  them  with  distaste 
and  languor.  They  seem  the  dust  of 
vanished  collisions  ;  the  good  and  bad 
in  them  are  confounded,  and  perhaps 
for  both  there  will  be  one  common 
doom — oblivion  ruthless  and  ineluc- 
table. 

Save  for  a  single  brief  deviation,  I 
have,  throughout  this  essay,  confined 
my  view  to  the  second  of  those  main 
divisions  into  which,  at  starting,  I  took 
leave  to  partition  literature  ;  that  is, 
neither  the  divinely  cantative,  which 
lies  almost  outside  the  critic's  jurisdic- 
tion, nor  the  frankly  loquitive,  which 
makes  appeal  to  a  more  loosely  con- 


PENCRAFT  101 

stituted  court  than  that  in  which  I 
plead,  but  the  strictly  and  funda- 
mentally scriptive,  the  special  province, 
nursery,  and  natural  home  of  the  pen. 
With  that  sphere  alone  am  I  properly 
concerned  ;  to  it  alone,  or  all  but  alone, 
is  anything  I  have  written  meant  to 
apply  ;  and  it  is  obviously  the  central 
and  predominant  region.  I  conclude 
by  reaffirming  in  brief  what  it  has  been 
my  essential  aim  to  set  forth  more  at 
large  ;  firstly,  that  in  this  predominant 
region  which  is  peculiarly  the  scene 
and  theatre  of  the  labours  and  fortunes 
of  the  pen,  the  arts  and  devices  pro- 
perly instrumental  to  those  labours 
and  fortunes  ought  not  to  be  used 
with  a  kind  of  slinking  furtiveness,  and 
with  gesture  of  shamefaced  apology, 
but  as  means  which  are  dignified 
and  even  consecrated  by  the  admitted 
nobility  of  their  ends ;  secondly, 
though  more  incidentally,  that  as  our 

G2 


102  PENCRAFT 

literature  is  rich  in  monuments  of 
commanding  potency  and  mastership, 
reared  by  men  who  visibly  rejoiced 
in  their  serene  conquest  of  the  in- 
struments they  worked  with,  there  is 
something  almost  ludicrous,  as  well  as 
radically  uncritical,  in  such  lack  of  the 
sense  of  proportion  as  permits  us  to  be, 
let  us  say,  preoccupied  with  Blake 
while  ignorant  of  Dryden  ;  further- 
more, that  although  the  soul  of  litera- 
ture is  without  doubt  a  greater  thing 
than  its  body,  it  is  chiefly  by  the 
splendour  and  glory  of  its  body  that 
men  are  invited,  beckoned,  and  snared 
into  the  splendour  and  glory  of  its 
soul ;  and  lastly,  that  if,  by  whatever 
unwise  treatment — even  by  a  too 
unsleeping  care  for  its  soul — we  suffer 
its  body  to  ail  or  languish,  every 
impaired  function,  every  degenerate 
organ,  will  open  to  that  soul  itself  an 
avenue  for  decay. 


PENCRAFT  103 

Here  and  there  in  this  little  book  the 
attitude  ventured  upon,  in  presence 
of  reputations  considered  by  many  to 
be  almost  sacrosanct,  has  been  far 
from  prostrate ;  nor  has  it  been  thought 
needful  to  apologise  for  sincerity  and 
independence.  Without  them,  criti- 
cism might  as  well  vacate  its  seat ; 
for,  to  borrow  the  words  of  this  writer's 
special  master  in  poesy — words  less 
resounding  than  many  that  we  quote 
from  him,  but  lifted  out  of  their  every- 
day mood  by  that  wondrous  voice  of 
his,  and  by  his  supremacy  in  that 
measure  which  seems  to  catch  from 
his  mind  such  a  nobly  disciplined 

freedom  : 

"  who  reads 

Incessantly,  and  to  his  reading  brings  not 
A  spirit  and  judgment  equal  or  superior, 
(And  what  he  brings,  what  needs  he  else- 
where seek  ?) 

Uncertain  and  unsettled  still  remains, 
Deep  versed  in  books  and  shallow  in  himself, 


104  PENCRAFT 

Crude  or  intoxicate,  collecting  toys 

And   trifles   for  choice  matters,   worth   a 

sponge ; 
As  children  gathering  pebbles  on  the  shore." 1 

1  Paradise  Regained,  IV,  322-329. 


BY   THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


THE     POEMS     OF 


Edited   and   arranged   with   an   Introduction,  by  J.  A.  SPENDER. 
In  2  Volumes.     With  Portrait  and  many  new  Poems. 

Crown  8vo.     9s.  net 

*»*  This  edition  is  tht  outcome  of  long  and  careful  preparation  by  the 
Author,  and  contains  hundreds  of  emendations  luhich  do  not  appear 
in  any  previous  volumes,  and  which  in  a  large  number  of  cases  enhance 
very  materially  the  interest  and  value  of  the  poems. 

SOME  OPINIONS 

Times. — "  William  Watson  is,  above  all  things,  an  artist  who  is 
proud  of  his  calling  and  conscientious  in  every  syllable  that  he  writes. 
To  appreciate  his  work  you  must  take  it  as  a  whole,  for  he  is  in  a  line 
with  the  high  priests  of  poetry,  reared,  like  Ion,  in  the  shadow  of 
Delphic  presences  and  memories,  and  weighing  every  word  of  his 
utterance  before  it  is  given  to  the  world." 

Athenefum. — "  His  poetry  is  a  'criticism  of  life,' and,  viewed  as  such, 
it  is  magnificent  in  its  lucidity,  its  elegance,  its  dignity.  We  revere  and 
admire  Mr.  Watson's  pursuit  of  a  splendid  ideal ;  and  we  are  sure  that 
his  artistic  self-mastery  will  be  rewarded  by  a  secure  place  in  the  ranks 
of  our  poets.  .  .  .  We  may  express  our  belief  that  Mr.  Watson  will 
keep  his  high  and  honourable  station  when  many  showier  but  shallower 
reputations  hare  withered  away,  and  must  figure  in  any  representative 
anthology  of  English  poetry.  ..." 

Westminster  Gazette. — "It  is  remarkable  that  when  Mr.  Watson's 

Coetry  directly  invites  comparison  wilh  the  poetry  of  preceding  masters 
is  equality  always,  his  incomparable  superiority  often,  becomes 
instantly  apparent.  .  .  .  No  discerning  critic  could  doubt  that  there 
are  more  elements  of  permanence  in  Mr.  Watson's  poems  than  in  those 
of  any_  of  his  present  contemporaries.  .  .  .  A  very  treasury  of  jewelled 
aphorisms,  as  profound  and  subtle  in  wisdom  and  truth  as  they  are 
consummately  felicitous  in  expression." 

Bookman. — "  From  the  very  first  in  these  columns  we  have  pleaded 
by  sober  argument,  not  by  hysterical  praise,  Mr.  Watson's  right  to  the 
foremost  place  among  our  living  poets.  The  book  is  ...  a  collection 
of  works  of  art,  like  a  cabinet  of  gems." 

Spectator. — "The  two  volumes  will  be  welcomed  by  the  poet's 
numerous  admirers.  There  is  a  pleasure  in  the  possession  of  a  com- 
plete edition  of  a  great  writer's  works.  .  .  .  We  must  apologise  for 
quoting  so  copiously,  but  the  book  is  so  fall  of  beautiful  things  that  in 
his  pleasure  at  seeing  them  altogether,  the  critic  is  irresistibly  tempted 
to  take  them  out  and  remind  his  readers  of  them  separately." 


JOHN  LANE,  THE  BODLEY  HEAD.,  VIGO  ST.,  W. 


BY  THE  SAME   AUTHOR 


NEW    POEMS    BY 
WILLIAM  WATSON 

Crown  8vo.     5s.  net. 

Also  an  Edition  de  Luxe.     Limited  to  75  Copies. 
Large  8vo.     21s.  net. 

SOME  PRESS  OPINIONS 

Spectator. — "In  these  days  of  slipshod  performance,  com- 
bined with  pretentious  theories  of  art,  it  is  a  comfort  to  have 
one  man  who  holds  by  the  old  stern  traditions,  who  reveres 
his  task,  and  scrupulously  and  honourably  gives  only  of  his 
best.  All  Mr.  Watson's  work  is  the  outcome  of  a  clear  and 
sane  philosophy  of  poetry.  In  Stevenson's  fine  phrase  his  aim 
is  '  the  piety  of  speech.'" 

Daily  Chronicle. — "Mr.  Watson- has  much  in  common 
with  Tennyson  as  a  lord  of  language.  .  .  .  Since  Landor 
there  have  been  few  poets  to  equal  Mr.  Watson,  in  the  grave 
and  terse  expression  of  passionate  thought." 

Mr.  JAMES  DOUGLAS  in  Star. — "There  is  no  longer  a 
famine  in  the  land  of  poetry,  for  at  last  we  have,  in  Mr. 
William  Watson's  New  Poems,  a  glorious  harvest  of  majestic 
song.  The  poet  has  vindicated  his  courageous  silence,  for 
in  this  noble  volume  there  is  an  emotional  depth,  an 
intellectual  variety,  and  a  passionate  splendour  of  inspiration 
and  of  craftsmanship  which  would  suffice  to  establish  a  great 
reputation.  The  poet  has  already  won  a  secure  place  among 
our  great  poetic  artists,  and  almost  the  highest  praise  we  can 
bestow  upon  these  poems  is  to  say  that  they  are  worthy  of 
him.  Yet  we  can  say  more  than  this,  for  there  are  new  notes 
in  them,  notes  of  tenderness,  of  pity,  of  joy.  .  .  .  There  are 
many  fine  poems  in  this  volume,  but  if  I  am  not  mistaken  the 
finest  of  all  is  this,  A  Tavern  Song,  which  is  beyond  all 
question  a  consummate  masterpiece  of  homely  English 
humour  and  gusto." 


JOHN  LANE,  THE  BODLEY  HEAD,  VIGO  ST.,  W. 


BY  THE   SAME  AUTHOR 
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BY  THE   SAME   AUTHOR 


EXCURSIONS   IN   CRITICISM  : 

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JOHN  LANE,  THE  BODLEY  HEAD,  VIGO  ST.,  W. 


DATE  DUE 


GAYLORD 


MTKO IN  u    s 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A     000  662  909     1 


